Word: temblors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...seismologists have long warned that Los Angeles is the more vulnerable city. Because Los Angeles has not suffered a massive tremor in this century and has a much larger population, a major quake could result in far greater devastation. The Federal Emergency Management Agency estimates that an 8.3 magnitude temblor (16 times as powerful as the one that hit San Francisco) on the southern San Andreas fault near Los Angeles could cause $17 billion in property damage and between 3,000 and 14,000 deaths...
...special vulnerabilities. Its water comes in by aqueducts that a big quake would fracture. Like the devastated Marina district in San Francisco, parts of coastal communities such as Marina Del Rey, Venice and Long Beach are built on sandy soil and landfill that could liquefy during a temblor, amplifying its destructive impact. State transportation officials last week handed the city council a list of 48 highway bridges and overpasses that need reinforcement to withstand a powerful quake. Cost: $32 million. Los Angeles' city engineer Robert Horii informed the city council that $100 million worth of shoring up may be required...
...shock wave, which registered 6.9 on the Richter scale, spread far beyond the battered towns and villages of Armenia. When the temblor struck, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was spending his first night in New York City. During lunch later that day with Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Gorbachev mentioned the earthquake briefly, noting that the damage was thought to be "very serious in some places." Some time after that, news of the growing toll reached him. Just after midnight, a visibly shaken Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze summoned the press to the Soviet U.N. mission on Manhattan's East 67th...
...terms of the death toll, the temblor was among the century's worst. In terms of the magnitude of the shock, though, it was a good deal less severe: the quake that hit Mexico City in 1985, for example, was a considerably more destructive 8.1 seismic shock, yet fewer than 10,000 people died. Experts laid much of the blame for last week's shocking toll on the shoddy construction of the buildings in Armenia's cities and towns. According to Brian Tucker, acting state geologist of California who has visited Armenia, many buildings in the region are made...
Mayor Emil Kirokofyan told the first group of foreign correspondents to visit the area after Wednesday's quake that recently constructed apartment buildings had not been built to withstand such a severe temblor--even though Leninakan is in an area of frequent earthquakes...