Thoughts on Rebuilding in Haiti, Chile, Turkey, and other Earthquake Ravaged Locations

There are certain aspects of life which we cannot control, and earthquakes are undoubtedly among the deadliest of these naturally born, impending disasters. Though quakes have been an unfortunate part of our Earth’s history, never have so many people lived in the numerous shake zones which exist throughout the globe. Given this fact, we know that earthquakes, like the ones we’ve seen over the past month in Chile, Turkey, and Haiti, are without question inevitable.

As I write this article, the City of Los Angeles sits no safer than Santiago de Chile, in the middle of the San Andreas quake zone which is long overdue to rupture. We have known for years that there will be a big quake in southern California, yet there is a constant gravitation of our population towards the beautiful beaches of So-Cal. In Haiti, as the rainy season begins, and disease begins to spread, the ramifications of bad location couldn’t be more apparent. Yet, as was mentioned by the President of Haiti yesterday at the White House, the Haitian people are inclined to rebuild and reconvene in Port-au-Prince, while the government wants to disperse the population to safer locations and rebuild smarter. Obviously, in the case of cities like LA, and Santiago, there is nowhere for their gigantic populations to go at this point in time, it’s too late.

Going forward though, we should aim as an informed public to do our best to develop new metropolitan areas in locales where we know that future devastation is not a given. We have the science, and obviously our west coast is under close scrutiny following the recent global shaking trends. We also need to continue to prepare the existing infrastructure in vulnerable areas so they can handle the strongest earthquakes. This way, when the shaking does happen, we can say we did our best to prevent the worst case scenario. We saw highway bridges collapse during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake near San Francisco and Oakland because they were not capable of withstanding the magnitude 6.9 impact of the quake. The same foreseeable mistakes can’t be made going forwards, and LA’s highway system must be on alert, and ready for the next big one.

The question going forward is what can be done to ensure that we don’t have a repeat of earthquake history in the United States, Chile, Haiti, Turkey, and elsewhere? Do we have the time, money, and man power to retrofit buildings and bridges before it’s too late? Does the solution in the future involve the mass herding of vulnerable populations out of quake and tsunami zones? The questions are difficult, but we would be foolish to sit on our hands and wait for the answers to be defined for us.