Natural Disasters

It's 8pm you are eating dinner and all of the sudden the floor starts shaking, you don’t know what to do so you hide underneath the table. This is what happened yesterday at 8pm in Ecuador. Jessica Elgot from The Guardian  reports, “Ecuador Pacific coast has been struck by the country’s strongest earthquake in decades, a 7.8-magnitude tremor”. When I heard the news through social media I could not help but look at the pictures. It was devastating.

The news of this earthquake hit home to me. When I move to California, two weeks after being here, there was a 5.0 earthquake where I lived. I remember being at the dinner table eating dinner with my family around 7:30PM and my chair just moving towards the window uncontrollably. “What is happening? Why I am moving?” I kept asking my mom. She did not know what to do but to tell us to go underneath the table. She ran to her room to pick up by 18-month old baby sister. I remember that moment extremely vividly because it was  the first time I ever experience and earthquake.

As I read about the devastating news of the Ecuador “272 deaths” were reported by their President Rafael Correa to CNN. I kept thinking about the situation that they must be living during this moment. What are these people going to do now? How can we as a community help with the damages of such natural disaster?

After reading an article published by The New York Times  from 1999 titled “The World; One Defense Against Quakes: Build Homes of Wood”. I learned that “wooden frames tend to do better in quakes because they have some flexibility”. Such type of construction allows the wood to move with the movement of the earthquake. That is why we have them here in California, since our earthquake rate is extremely high. However, as said by expert Bob Reitherman a “executive director of California Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering” the wood does not work as well as “they thought”. So what can we do to prevent that such natural catastrophes end with the life of many civilians?

I believe that even though they might not be as effective, building wood houses can be a step towards preventing human catastrophes. In South American countries, the majority of the “ homes are often made of unreinforced masonry, adobe or mud, and there are few residential building codes” (New York Times). Such construction makes the houses extremely fragile towards earthquakes. If we start building houses with woods and stronger materials that are able to support the movement of the temblor, maybe we could prevent 270 deaths. I am not saying that by changing the way of construction in all countries we will be safe from natural disasters. That is just impossible. But if we try to utilized our technology with our construction maybe we can create a solution to make natural disasters less harmful.