Earthquakes

(Map of the Anatolian Plate and East Anatolian Fault from Wikipedia)

On 17 August 1999 around 03:00 in the morning, Turkey suffered a magnitude 7.6 earthquake near Izmit. It was one of the most destructive earthquakes ever recorded in the area.

When it happened, I was on contract at a Du Pont site. Du Pont was entering a joint venture with a Turkish company that had a factory at Izmit. A process control system for the joint venture was being developed at the site where I was working.

We got an inkling of how the Turkish company treated its workers from the unusually low earthquake death toll among their workers and the workers’ families.

Here is what that meant.

In the earthquake’s death toll, we could see a wealth disparity. Poor people tended to live in buildings that were not built to withstand earthquakes. Those buildings collapsed, crushing people who lived in them. People who were better paid tended to live in buildings that were constructed better. Despite damage, their buildings were less likely to collapse. They were more likely to survive.

The Turkish company’s workforce lived in buildings that didn’t crush them, which meant they were paid well enough to choose such buildings.

Aftermath

The factory was a mess. The tank of molten polymer that fed production machinery detached from its anchors, spilling its contents all over everything. Of course, then the polymer hardened all over and inside of everything. The hardened goop had to be removed before repairs could even begin.

It could be chipped off surfaces, but what about removing it from inside equipment that was full and stopped running due to the earthquake? When that happens at their type of plant, the hardened feedstock has to be machined out. Imagine needing to clean out the pistons on your car if they get plugged by cured epoxy. You would have to drill it out, and do so carefully so that you didn’t damage the pistons. They had to do something like that. It takes months.

In the meantime, the workers and their families had nowhere to live. Most buildings weren’t safe even if they had not fallen down. Everyone went to the factory. Workers, spouses, children… extended families. They had nowhere else to go.

People caught in such disasters get upset when their government and aid agencies don’t get to everyone fast enough, but after an immense disaster it simply isn’t possible for any government or agency to do that. Du Pont immediately sent relief. Tents, first aid, supplies, things that could have taken too long to get if the Turkish company had to go to the same aid agencies as everyone else.

This Time It’s Winter

This time Turkey has gotten a stronger earthquake with aftershocks nearly as powerful as the initial tremor. It’s in another part of the country, close enough to Syria to wreak havoc there too. It struck in the early hours of morning again, when people were asleep at home.

It struck in winter. That makes the aftermath even harder. In Syria it is further complicated by the civil war there. But this quake collapsed so many buildings for reasons that are entirely too familiar.

Taste of the Future?

Some scientists hypothesized years ago that if we melt glaciers, the resulting change in stresses on the earth’s crust could lead to more or stronger earthquakes. If that hypothesis is correct, we can expect more catastrophes like the devastating earthquake a few days ago in Turkey.

Fortunately, data says that hypothesis has some merit but we aren’t getting more of the major earthquakes that cause terrible suffering and damage, at least so far.

If you are too quick and casual searching for information about this, you can find alarming charts that say earthquake activity is rising dramatically. The articles around those graphs say this is evidence that the End Times are coming and various doomsday prophesies are coming true.

Websites like that are why it’s important to pay attention to the provenance of our data.

NASA says the weight of water (and therefore also the weight of ice) does have some effect on seismic activity. As we have come to expect of NASA, they considered the issue from several angles, including human activity that pumps water out of the ground, injects fluid into the ground, creates or drains reservoirs, and so on. Earthquakes resulting from such changes are indeed becoming more frequent as we carry out more such activities. Some of the earthquakes are strong enough to cause some damage, but they aren’t whoppers akin to Turkey’s. They tend to top out below magnitude 6 on the Richter scale. Most of them are microquakes too small for humans to detect.

You could lump the increasing microquakes in with larger earthquakes to make charts that look like the world is about to shake itself to pieces, which is handy for prophesies of doom.

To get a clearer picture of whether we are getting more big quakes, I downloaded data about earthquakes from 1900 onward from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). When I look at only global earthquakes of magnitude 6 or higher, a graph over time is reassuringly not going up.

So, whew!

What has happened in Turkey and Syria is awful. This won’t be the last time a major earthquake causes so much death, misery and damage. But we aren’t getting such major earthquakes more often. Really.