Word: kobe
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...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...
...city of Nishinomiya, nine miles outside the port of Kobe, contains many rooms the same size as those simulators. They tend to be in two-story, traditional wooden houses built in the years just after World War II. The roofs of such houses are heavy blue or brown tile. The walls are a thin lattice of light wood finished with stucco. The effect, says Laurence Kornfield, a San Francisco chief building inspector familiar with the style, is ``a lot like putting a heavy book up on top of a frame of pencils...
...Tuesday, when a real earthquake, the most deadly since 1923, roared through the Kobe area, something happened to the little rooms that never happens in the simulator machines. Their roofs fell in. By the tens of thousands. Where each house stood, there is now just a brown or blue blanket of tile, settled almost gently over a wreckage of wood, plaster and human bodies...