Word: strength
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Since earthquakes can't be accurately predicted or stopped, the key to preventing damage is to prepare. The death toll and destruction from a serious temblor often has less to do with the strength of the quake than with the strength of building codes and emergency-response plans. In the years since the 1989 quake, California has reinforced building codes, especially for public structures like schools and hospitals, while the state government has spent billions to improve the reliability of highways, bridges and roads. The Bay Bridge - which partly collapsed in 1989 - is being remade to handle the largest plausible...
...Angeles are instructive. First, there's the science of quake analysis and prediction. In 1989 the Bay Area had only 75 accelerometer sensors, which locate quakes and determine their intensity. Today, there are more than 200, which allow seismologists to more immediately pin down the size and strength of an earthquake as it happens. Many of those sensors have also been equipped with global-positioning system add-ons, which can determine the rate at which a quake has caused a fault to slip. Scientists in the Bay Area have also dug several deep trenches that expose rock layers that have...
...original blessing signed by Mother Teresa in an old book that I had bought," Bhattacharya says, holding a yellowish postcard with Mother Teresa's blessings in her writing. "I was going through some turbulence in my personal life during that time, and the find gave me immense hope and strength. For me, it is a sacred symbol...
...facts. The U.S. is the world's largest debtor nation and only digging itself in deeper. Respect for corporate America is evaporating. Profligacy produced sham economic growth. A disconnect between Washington's global ambitions and its available resources - what British historian Paul Kennedy calls "imperial overstretch" - has undermined national strength...
...China's Premier, Wen Jiabao. In a statement following the conclusion of the National People's Congress in March 2007, Premier Wen acknowledged that the Chinese economy looked extremely strong on the surface, especially in terms of GDP and employment growth. Yet, beneath the surface, he cautioned, such strength was far more questionable. In the case of China, he warned of an economy that was increasingly "unbalanced, unstable, uncoordinated and unsustainable." Little did he realize at the time how those "four uns," as they were later to become known, would pose an immediate and tough challenge to China's growth...