Urban areas, earthquakes a lethal combination

WASHINGTON —

Megacities are something new on the planet. Earthquakes are something very old. The two are a lethal combination, as seen in the recent tragedy in Port-au-Prince, where more than 200,000 people perished — a catastrophe that scientists say is certain to be repeated somewhere, and probably soon, with death tolls that once again stagger the mind.

In Saturday's 8.8 magnitude quake in Chile, more than 100 people died in Concepción, the largest city near the epicenter, with more than 200,000 people. The quake epicenter was in a relatively unpopulated area.

In 1800, there was just one city with more than a million people — Beijing. Now there are 381 urban areas with at least 1 million inhabitants. Urbanization crossed a threshold last year when, for the first time, more people lived in city settings than rural ones. About 403 million people live in cities that face significant seismic hazard, according to a recent study by seismologist Roger Bilham, of the University of Colorado.

The next Big One could strike Tokyo, Istanbul, Tehran, Mexico City, New Delhi, Katmandu or the two metropolises near California's San Andreas Fault, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Or it could devastate Dhaka, Jakarta, Karachi, Manila, Cairo, Osaka, Lima or Bogotá. The list goes on and on.

"You can name about 25 cities that are like Port-au-Prince. They're not going to shake but every 250 years (on average). But if you can name 25 of them, you're going to have an event like this every 10 years," said David Wald, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Bilham, who has spent decades studying major earthquakes around the world, said the planet's growing, urbanizing population, projected to swell by 2 billion more people by midcentury and to require 1 billion dwellings, faced "an unrecognized weapon of mass destruction: houses."

In Tehran, Iran's capital, Bilham has calculated that 1 million people could die in a predicted quake similar in intensity to the one in Haiti. Some Iranian geologists have pressed their government for decades to move the capital because of the nest of surrounding geologic faults.

In many vulnerable cities, people are effectively stacked on top of one another in buildings designed as if earthquakes don't happen. It is not the tremor that kills people in an earthquake but the buildings, routinely constructed on the cheap, using faulty designs and, in some cities, overseen by corrupt inspectors. The difference between life and death is often a matter of how much sand went into the cement or how much steel into a supporting column. Earthquakes might be viewed as acts of God, but their lethality is often a function of masonry.

The entire Caribbean is seismically active. So is much of Central America. The next Big One could be on the isthmus of Panama, where Panama City sits just six miles from a major fault that hasn't ruptured in four centuries, said Mary Lou Zoback, a seismologist who works for the California-based Risk Management Solutions.

Or the next catastrophe could be in Caracas, Venezuela, where millions of people live in poverty near a boundary of two tectonic plates, including the one that created the fault that broke in Haiti. The last catastrophic quake was 198 years ago. Zoback said that relief groups have donated bricks to poor people in Caracas to help them build homes but that unreinforced brick dwellings are death traps in an earthquake.

Another seismic bull's-eye is Mexico City, which sits on the worst possible soil, a drained lake bed that will intensify seismic waves. The city also is in a basin in the mountains, which essentially traps the seismic waves. The devastating earthquake of 1985, which killed about 10,000 people, was centered hundreds of miles away but managed to ring Mexico City like a bell.

Earthquakes can turn up closer to home than many Americans realize. Several major tremors have been recorded off the East Coast, including near Newfoundland in 1929 and Boston in 1755. Charleston, S.C., had a quake in 1886 that killed 60 people. Susan Hough, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said it might be that all three earthquakes were associated with the edge of the continental shelf and that any coastal city, including Washington, could get rattled by a quake someday.

Another hazard is right in the Mississippi River valley. Memphis, Tenn., is close to the New Madrid fault, which caused powerful earthquakes in 1811 and 1812.

By some measures, the American city at greatest risk of a disastrous earthquake is New York.

Although New York City is rarely thought of as earthquake country, the region experiences many small tremors that indicate that larger ones are possible. The good news is that a magnitude-6 earthquake should happen only every 670 years or so. A magnitude-7 tremor should happen every 3,400 years. That's the calculation by scientists at Columbia University who studied 383 much smaller tremors recorded in the New York area from 1677 to 2007.

The bad news is that there is a massive amount of infrastructure built without earthquakes in mind.

"A lot of old brownstones — they crumble well," Zoback said.

Brian Tucker, an earth scientist who leads GeoHazards International, said 10 percent of the money going to help Haiti rebuild should be dedicated to mitigating the destruction in earthquakes.

Bilham said he would like to see the United Nations develop a building-inspection program akin to its efforts to look for banned nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

Zoback, likewise, is impatient for action that could save lives: "We know where the problems are. We know what to do. We know how to fix it. We just need the political will."

Additional information from The Associated Press and The New York Times