Word: kobe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...textbook on the essential lessons of the Kobe earthquake and the one that struck the Northridge section of Los Angeles on the same date a year earlier would read something like this...
...source of the devastating 1923 temblor that killed 143,000 people in Tokyo and Yokohama. American scientists have kept a close watch on the San Andreas fault that runs for 650 miles through California from north of San Francisco nearly to the Mexican border. But the Kobe and Northridge quakes occurred not along these major inter-plate faults--cracks where continent-size plates grind against one another--but on intra-plate faults that spiderweb a single giant plate...
...destructive behavior of each quake is subject to countless variables: the direction of fracturing, the composition of underlying soils, whether the motion occurs close to the surface (as in Kobe) or deeper underground (Northridge), even the time of day or night. The severity of a quake as gauged by energy released is also no measure of its destructiveness. A small quake in the center of a city can kill 1,000 people for every life lost to a monster tremor in a thinly populated place--like the death toll if any (there doesn't seem to be an exact count...
...ought to be, Do not build on filled land. Such areas are subject to a phenomenon called liquefaction. Quake vibrations rupture the surface, allowing water-saturated soil to rise up and turn what seemed to be solid ground into something like a quaking bowl of Jell-O. In both Kobe and the Marina district of San Francisco, site of the worst damage from the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, liquefaction proved disastrous; the same could happen in the Oakland area across San Francisco Bay. Warns Ross Stein, Geological Survey physicist in Menlo Park, California: ``Kobe is almost a dress rehearsal...
Skyscrapers built to sway with a buckling earth and low-rise buildings that sit on rubber pads that act like shock absorbers, a common feature of hospital design, have proved their worth. In Kobe it appears that few, if any, buildings constructed after 1980, when a stricter code was enacted, were destroyed. And the widespread wreckage of wooden houses in Kobe is no clue to what might happen elsewhere; wooden houses in Northridge, built to a very different pattern, stood up well...