Designing a Quake-Resistant Building Starts at the Soil

28 March 2011

An earthquake survivor searches for belongings in her destroyed house in the city of Kesennuma in northern Japan

This is the VOA Special English Technology Report.

Builders in developing countries are often not required to build strong buildings. So, when a disaster strikes, the damage is often widespread.

Yet Japan is one of the most developed countries in the world. Still, the March eleventh earthquake and tsunami waves destroyed more than fourteen thousand buildings.

Brady Cox is an assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of Arkansas. He is also an earthquake expert with an organization called Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance, or GEER. The group studies major disasters.

Professor Cox says Japan has one of the best building-code systems in the world.

BRADY COX: "The problem is this earthquake was just a mammoth earthquake, one of the, you know, top five earthquakes in recorded history. So anytime you have an earthquake that large, you are going to have damage."

The quake measured magnitude nine.

BRADY COX: "One thing I think a lot of people don't understand is that building codes are meant to prevent loss of life in earthquakes, that doesn’t mean that the buildings won't -- or bridges for that matter, or anything -- won't sustain significant damage."