Re: Turkish earth quake
My late wife and I spent two months trekking*around Turkey by public bus and stayed in their equivalent of local B and Bs. for accommodations.* We traveled to within a hundred miles of that place on*the*borders of Turkey and Syria.* The population down there are half Turk and half Kurdish and loath each other.*
The taxi driver*of a cab we took from the bus station to a small hotel, for some reason waved a gun in the car heading from the bus station and told us it was in case the Kurds caused*trouble.* We were not happy campers and grabbed a bus back up to central Turkey. Plus, the English language*newspaper, we bought had the headline*story that a German backpacker had just been murdered by Kurds. Out of there!
The reason so many people die in earthquakes in Turkey is the poor construction*of buildings and the majority live in 6 to 8 floor apartment buildings. They build a frame of girders, say six floors, the ground floor is a cement slab, next they lay out frames say four ft. by eight ft and about 6 inches thick Next lay in a half a dozen iron rebars, then fill the frame with cement.* When set they lift them on wooden T support and connect cement to dry and fill-in the ceiling*and walls, which becomes the floor of the second story floor, and so on for six to eight stories, (leaving spaces for doors, windows and hallways etc.).*
Now when an earthquake hits the shake knocks the floor/ceiling*out of the frame and five floors pancake down.* A similar*effect happened when those planes were flown into the buildings in New York.
Most of the people in California, another earthquake prone*area, live in single family dwellings and smaller apartment dwellings (2-3 floors), plus superior earthquake*protection*methods of construction are strictly enforced by mandatory*building codes. With heavy criminal penalties for shortcut avoidance*of rules and regulation.
I lived in El Segundo, California when a 6-7 magnitude earthquake hit Northridge, Calif.. True it's less than this Turkey one at 7.8, however, though 31 miles away (the other side of L.A.) it was strong enough to roll me out of bed. In the whole of the L.A. area. there were 56 deaths, compared to an estimated 20,000. We complain about government intervention and rule and regulations, but something like this brings home what superior government and it's rules and regulation do for us.
Rodney**
Rodney David Richard Mills
R602188 Gravesend