Seismic Provisions Needed along the U.S. New Madrid Fault Line

Building codes including safety provisions to protect lives and property from earthquakes have been used in quake-prone California since 1927. Those provisions, and the continuous improvement and enforcement of building codes through the years, seemed to have done their job once again following this week’s 7.2 magnitude earthquake that struck the border area between California and Mexico.

In Haiti, according to the latest news reports, at least 230,000 lives were lost, millions displaced and most of the buildings in the capital city of Port au Prince severely damaged or destroyed.

In the past few months, we all looked on in dismay and profound sadness as we read and heard the news about earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. The differences between lives lost and property damage from earthquakes are unequivocally related to the enforcement, or lack of enforcement, of building safety codes.  Chile’s quake was a 8.8 magnitude, 500 times more powerful than the earthquake that hit Haiti but its toll in both lives lost and property damage was nowhere near as devastating. Chile, like the United States, uses and enforces building codes.

 In the United States the 1989 Loma Prieta 7.1 earthquake, whose epicenter was just south of the densely populated San Francisco bay area, caused 60 deaths and damaged 20,000 structures.

Unfortunately, even in our own country there is a tendency to ignore the obvious. About 200 years ago, four major quakes ranging from 7.0 to 8.0 hit the New Madrid region, covering eight states,  including the cities of Memphis (Tenn.), Nashville (Tenn.), St. Louis and Little Rock (Ark.), causing the Mississippi River to run upstream and church bells to ring in Boston.

We know that a similar quake in this region today would be one of the worst disasters in American history causing tens of thousands of deaths, displacing hundreds of thousands, not to mention the hundreds of billions in economic losses.  And yet despite everything we have witnessed and everything we know, code officials in the New Madrid region of our country are struggling to persuade local and state governments to keep the seismic provisions that are in the codes developed by the International Code Council and used throughout the nation.

Building smart saves lives and money.  Let’s not be penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Please contact us to learn more about how strong codes and smart code officials can make your community resilient to disasters. Building smart saves lives and money. Let’s not be penny-wise and pound-foolish.

Revised timing reference Madrid quake; posted April 2, 2010.