HaitiOne of the hurdles for building in Leucadia is getting your plans through Encinitas plan check. Should the free market be allowed determine engineering quality of homes and businesses?
Here are some excerpts from the CS Monitor.
Why Mexicali earthquake damage is nothing compared to Haiti
One reason for the lower death toll and damage is that the epicenter of Sunday’s quake was in an agricultural belt with few buildings 38 miles from the city of Mexicali in northern Mexico. The Haiti quake was only 18 miles from its densely populated capital of 2.5 million people...
The secondary factor would be seismic codes,” says Eduardo Miranda, a civil engineer specialized in earthquakes at Stanford University, who has studied earthquakes in the Mexicali region and is heading there this week. “Both in Mexico and the US we have seismic codes that in general are being enforced. There is a culture of earthquakes.”
But geography alone did not help limit damage. Just as in Chile, where a massive 8.8-magnitude quake, one of the strongest in a century, killed far fewer people than in Haiti, building codes and enforcement of them here most likely played a critical role, too...
Experts from both countries share research and therefore end up with similar building codes, says Stephen Mahin, a structural engineer at the University of California, Berkeley. He says that Mexicali's proximity with the US has led to a robust interchange of information on how to build correctly.
Mr. Miranda says that, unlike in the US, residential housing does not have the same standards as commercial buildings, which means many people build their own homes without the input of an engineer. But he says people still build smarter because of their experience with earthquakes.
Read the entire article here.
The difference in casualty rates between Haiti and the US is not due to building codes, it's due to poverty. Haiti could pass the most modern building codes in the world, but people will continue to build houses out of stacked cinder blocks because that's all they can afford (if that). Likewise if you're building a house here you will hire someone who can design it to withstand earthquakes, regardless of what the Encinitas building codes say, because you can afford it.
ReplyDeleteIf that 7.2 had an epicenter under Mexico City, there surely would have been heavy casualties despite their wonderful building codes. You see PLENTY of stacked cinder block structures all over Mexico. Those do not survive major earthquakes. If you can't afford to build a structure safely, it doesn't matter what the building codes say. People would rather violate a building code than be homeless.
I can't wait to see the rest of the world line up to be charitable toward the US during a major disaster here.... oh, yeah - the won't.
ReplyDeleteLeucadia First!
Building codes did NOT originate as government mandates; they were mandated by insurers. If you wanted to get insurance on your building, you had to build it to code. I know it's fashionable to dump on the "free market", but it helps if you have your facts straight (e.g., the myth of the rational consumer, not building codes).
ReplyDelete