Preparing for EarthquakesBritney Johnson

Predicting an earthquake is an extremely hard thing to do accurately. You are never able to tell EXACTLY when an earthquake will occur. The only thing that we can do is to prepare as best as we can with making buildings safe, having emergency evacuation plans and compiling survival supplies.

Earthquakes

With advanced technology, we are able to make buildings safer than ever. In the past, the buildings weren’t even close to being ready for an earthquake. With all of the bricks and mortar piled up stories high, if an earthquake hit, they would come toppling down and most likely kill everyone in the building.

Buildings

Photo Credit: Google Images

One of the buildings we have here on campus is not designed to survive an earthquake. The design, brick and support beams are not supportive of the mass that is on top of the beams. As you can see here, one of the main beams is cracked all of the way down, and there hasn’t even been an earthquake yet. It is just buckling under the pressure of the heavy brick on top.

Buildings

Another thing that makes this building unsafe is the bricks. There is no structure to help the bricks from toppling down if the earth starts to shake. Since this building was build nearly 90 years ago, they didn’t have the technology to make buildings strong structurally that could survive a large earthquake.

Buildings

Here at Salt Lake Community College, they are making improvements to make our buildings on campus earthquake safe. The new building located on the Taylorsville Redwood campus has a lot of features that prevent the building from toppling down after just a couple of violent shakes.

Buildings

Photo: Britney Johnson

These cross-braces help the building to be stable. With the back and forth shaking that the earthquake will cause the building, these triangular beams will help stabilize the building. Because they are diagonal, the back and forth shaking won’t affect the building as much as it would a building without these cross-braces.

Buildings

With the advanced technology and the information we know, we can make buildings safer than they have ever been before. You are never going to be able to prevent an earthquake. You can only prepare and make things suitable for the shaking the earthquake can cause. We are fortunate here in America as well, because most of the world doesn’t have this kind of technology and money. We can keep the fatality rates down because of this equipment, unlike third world countries where if they experience an earthquake of the same magnitude, they would have thousands more of fatalities.

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