When I was younger I remember feeling the Loma Prieta quake while at an after-school program, and then upon returning home, heading next door to see my neighbor’s swimming pool still thrashing about. It was a peculiar sight.

(Photo: Creative Corps / Flickr)

That sense of peculiarity has returned to me these last couple months. First the earthquake in Haiti occurring a little less than a year after I was in the country assisting with a post disaster environmental assessment. And now the earthquake in Chile. Concepcion, Chile, the second largest city in the country that has sustained some of the most horrific damage, was my home for the better part of five months a number of years ago. The epicenter of the quake itself was disturbingly close to a remote stretch of coastline where my friends and I would retreat to camp and surf.

Both of these earthquakes are reminders that Earth is not a static place, but a changing and at times violent one. Some of those changes are gradual, and other times, as we have observed, they are sudden and severe. Both Haiti and Chile offer two examples of the latter case.

Chile and Haiti are two very different places. Chile is one of the most prosperous countries in South America, and Haiti, the poorest in the western hemisphere. Chile has a civil and social infrastructure and a strong government. Haiti’s government has been plagued by corruption, a lack of resources, and depends heavily on foreign assistance. However, if there are some lessons to be drawn from these events, we would be wise to take note.

One of the main lessons and distinctions I see between these two events has to do with building codes in each country. It is not the earthquake per se that leads to the most deaths, but the response of our built environment to these events that seals our fate. Or as a professor of mine once said, “earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do.” The magnitude of the quake certainly determines the destructive potential, but aside from landslides and tsunamis, if you take buildings out of the equation, there would be relatively few deaths resulting from earthquakes. More often than not, poverty determines the readiness of the built environment.

Cinder block housing in Haiti

There are no building codes in Haiti, and the overwhelming majority of buildings, both commercial and residential, were built with stacked cinderblocks, cheap cement, poor support beams, and even sticks as side pillars – if they were even present at all (see a photo album on building practices in Port-au-Princes). Many buildings were stacked upon each other in this fashion, which is why so many of the buildings in Port-au-Prince essentially pancaked upon each other. Throw high density into the mix, and the death toll skyrockets.

Chile, on the other hand, does have building codes and even many of the more inexpensive dwellings are built to minimum structural standards so they are quake resistant. While many of the buildings in Chile have been very heavily damaged, they have not pancaked or collapsed to the same degree as they did in Haiti, and those structural requirements are likely a big reason for that. The significantly lower death tolls in Chile are no doubt a result of this as well.

Given how many cities across the world are vulnerable to earthquakes, it might be a good idea to at the very least make sure we are building to code, and not cutting corners with the materials we use. In areas where people are left with no choice but to do so anyway, as was the case in Haiti, we must ask ourselves whether we would rather help transform the building sector in these parts of the world, or bear witness to more tragedies like we have seen these past two months.

For more information:

Listen here for an analysis from the USGS: Lessons from Chile: Preparation is Key.

Andrew Revkin from the New York Times wrote a really good piece about the risk that cities around the world face from earthquakes, and his timing was eerily spot on.

And check out this graphic showing the distribution of earthquakes across the planet.

Earthquake distribution across the planet