So one of my duties as an aspiring Architect of California health care facilities is working with seismic codes and employing seismic design in hospitals. Due to professional practice, I've now become interested in seismic events both near and far. Today at 12:12:10pm PST a microquake occurred 12 miles from San Diego. I was in a hospital in La Jolla and did not feel a thing. Actually, microquakes occur at 2.0 or less on the Richter scale and are not supposed to be felt. It takes a 3.0 for humans to know something is wrong. There's talk and agreement among Seismologists that a large earthquake is inevitable for the southern San Andreas fault which runs through Palm Springs, San Bernadino, Riverside and the Imperial County. The southern end has not seen a major quake in 300 years. A 6.o - 6.9 quake will cause damage 100 miles from the epicenter. San Diego is 124 miles from Palm Springs so I hope that is far enough...otherwise I should be getting my emergency supplies together now. Actually, that's probably a good idea regardless of what my seismic future holds. The quake that just occurred in Indonesia was a 6.3 with aftershocks just as strong. The Pacific Ring of Fire is unforgiving and relentless. I wonder what kind of seismic codes (if any) Indonesia uses for homes and larger buildings. In the 2004 indonesian earthquake the USGS estimated 229,866 people displaced. That's a lot of homes destroyed. Many of these dwellings are unreinforced brick or concrete block making them heavy and easy to crumble by shearing forces and inhabitants are crushed-to-death. I did read of one architect in Indonesia who's trying to get people to adopt and use flexible materials in different ways like combining bamboo framing with block knee walls. With so many natural disasters in so many places there is a need for adaptive, short-term, rapidly deployed housing solutions or hyper-responsive architecture. There's got to be better solutions than FEMA trailers!
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At the Science Museum of MN there is a giant modern-sculpturish xylophone that's connected to a computer. The program registers any earthquake anywhere in the world over something like 4.0, and everytime a seismic event occurs the xylophone plays a pre-programmed set of notes, which varies depending on the location of the quake and the strength of the activity. You could just sit there all day and listen to the constant shifting of the earth's crust. It's pretty damned cool.
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