Earthquake

ARMENIA, Colombia -- When the massive seismic waves subsided last week, the residents of the impoverished warrens in the south of this town could barely find an unchipped brick to salvage. But in the north, in what passes for the ritzy uptown of this city of 300,000, there were condominiums and apartments with hardly a crack.The town hit by the 6.0-magnitude earthquake is split by a socioeconomic fault line between the poor, who build where they can with materials at hand, and the more wealthy, whose housing was built with more care, under stricter codes.

Both Turkey and Taiwan have effectively adopted the California building requirements for earthquakes, which are intended to enable occupants to get out alive in a major earthquake even if the structure is rendered unusable, American experts said yesterday. The difference is in enforcement.The basic techniques involve using reinforced concrete walls and columns, deep foundations and joints to transfer the stresses of a swaying structure from crossbeams to vertical columns."Here, we have reasonable conformity," said Peter I. Yanev, president of EQE International, a leading international earthquake engineering and safety company based in San Francisco, who recently returned from Turkey.

GOLCUK, Turkey -- It was early yesterday when members of the Aydin family finally took a break from digging out corpses of their relatives.Golcuk, pulverized by Turkey's huge earthquake Tuesday, seemed a scene from hell. Its buildings are rubble; most of its residents are evacuated -- or dead.But the Aydins were an island of calm. A clan of nearly 40 brothers, sisters, cousins and spouses, they had traveled nearly 600 miles from the eastern city of Erzincan to rescue or bury five trapped relatives.

Dr. Glen Brubaker is giving up the comforts and joys of Christmas with his family and spending the holiday helping earthquake victims in Turkey.The 58-year-old doctor, who is the medical adviser to Interchurch Medical Assistance in New Windsor, left his home in Lancaster, Pa., on Wednesday for Ankara, capital of the predominantly Muslim country. He will oversee a $50,000 shipment of medicine and hospital supplies donated by Lutheran World Relief and sorely needed in areas devastated by the earthquakes in August and November.

AN OLD FRIEND of mine lives in San Francisco, which is a great place to live if you don't mind the Earth splitting open occasionally and buildings collapsing around you.Anyway, Steve called the other day to say that the Bay Area had been hit by another earthquake just before dawn. Apparently, it was a pretty good jolt, too -- 4.1 on the Richter scale.Me, I'm the type of person who gets jittery watching Jell-O quiver in a bowl.If the walls started shaking and I got flung out of bed by an earthquake at 4 in the morning, I'd be knocking back fistfuls of Valium like they were Tic-Tacs.

GIOTTO DI BONDONE painted saints with individual humanity and modeled faces, pointing Italian painting away from Byzantine forms toward the Renaissance. In the early 14th century he painted frescoes of the life of St. Francis of Assisi on the ceiling of the basilica in the saint's home town of Assisi. They have drawn religious and art pilgrims since, indestructible despite invasions, revolution, pollution, earthquakes and even the Allied drive up the Italian boot in World War II -- until September 26.That's when an earthquake killed dozens of people in central Italy and shook loose the precious plaster.

Last week, many residents of Columbia's Kings Contrivance and Hickory Ridge villages were startled by a loud boom -- one that turns out to have been an earthquake registering magnitude 2.0.The earthquake was the biggest one in the county since the spring of 1993 when Howard was shaken by 16 small quakes, one of which registered magnitude 2.7.Dozens of concerned Howard residents called 911 in the early hours of Dec. 22, many claiming to have heard the tell-tale...

Last week, many residents of Columbia's Kings Contrivance and Hickory Ridge villages were startled by a loud boom -- one that turns out to have been an earthquake registering magnitude 2.0.The earthquake was the biggest one in the county since the spring of 1993, when Howard was shaken by 16 small quakes, one of which registered magnitude 2.7.Dozens of concerned Howard residents called 911 in the early hours of Dec. 22, many claiming to have heard the...

When tragedies like the Japan earthquake strike, many people around the world now pluck much of the news from cyberspace.Soon after the earth stopped shaking Tuesday in Kobe, Japan, )) e-mail messages began flying over the Internet, the worldwide communications system linking computers, from people exchanging information.Two prominent Japanese institutions quickly set up what are known as World Wide Web pages loaded with information about conditions and lists of the victims.Web pages use text, pictures and graphics to provide reams of information, which the user can access by clicking a computer mouse.

Not many pianists can say -- as Ann Schein can -- "My career began with a major earthquake.""Really, it did," Schein tells a startled visitor to her Pikesville home, explaining that Mexico had been hit by its worst earthquake of the decade only hours before her 1957 debut in the Rachmaninov Third Concerto with the Mexico City Philharmonic.Schein, then 17, was in Mexico with Mieczyslaw Munz, her teacher at the Peabody Conservatory, and her parents. They decided to walk through the rubble-littered streets to the concert hall -- "just in case anyone showed up," Schein says.

About five minutes after Fran Mathews went to bed, she heard a boom and felt her house in northern Harford County shudder. "I was afraid enough to see if the furnace had blown up," said Mathews, 61. What rattled Mathews and others in northern Harford County yesterday was a minor earthquake at 12:04 a.m. in Lancaster County, Pa. The 3.3-magnitude quake was centered in the Salunga-Landisville area, about 40 miles north of the Pennsylvania-Maryland line,...

LOS ANGELES - A moderate earthquake, the largest in Southern California since 1999, struck 35 miles east of downtown Los Angeles yesterday morning. It swayed buildings and tossed food off grocery store shelves, but there were no reports of major injuries or damage. The earthquake, which registered a 5.4 magnitude, was centered near Chino Hills in San Bernardino County and was felt as far east as Las Vegas and south to San Diego. "This is moderate," said Erik Pounders, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena.

As San Francisco marks the 100th anniversary of its great earthquake and fire this Tuesday, it's worth asking, in light of the terrible natural calamity of our own century, about the aftermath. What followed the disaster? It has been almost eight months since Hurricane Katrina made New Orleans its biggest and most famous casualty. Thousands of the city's citizens are still scattered, thousands of its homes still uninhabitable. Huge amounts of work have yet to get under way, stalled by insurance squabbles and the wait for federal funds and regulations (some of which were announced last week)

SAN FRANCISCO -- The year was 1906. The city was demolished by an earthquake. Then ravaged by fire. San Francisco quickly rebuilt and trumpeted itself as a world-class city gracefully risen from the ashes. What would be remembered through the years were the positives: the heroism, the generosity of neighboring cities, the gorgeous architecture that replaced what was lost. Hidden in the city's rewritten history were darker realities. In the chaos, San Franciscans lashed out at the underclass - beating and shooting Chinese immigrants, in part to keep them from rebuilding Chinatown.

PHILADELPHIA -- When the tsunami swallowed huge swaths of South Asia in December, the United Nations appealed for $1 billion in emergency aid. The appeal reached 80 percent of its goal in 10 days. Governments and ordinary citizens all around the world dug deep to help. But by the time a massive earthquake devastated a remote Himalayan region of Pakistan on Oct. 8 and killed at least 73,000 people, the world was reeling from donor fatigue. The Niger famine, the genocide in Darfur and devastating hurricanes in the Southern United States - all that giving had emptied people's wallets.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Rattled by a powerful aftershock and later rumors that a big earthquake was coming, Pakistanis fled damaged homes and hospitals in the middle of the night and flooded out of multistory buildings in the capital at midday yesterday. The panic in the wake of last week's earthquake thwarted the rescue of a woman trapped in Muzaffarabad and later briefly paralyzed commerce in Islamabad's government district. Amid the new confusion, the United Nations' top humanitarian official warned yesterday that the clock was running out for getting to survivors isolated after Saturday's magnitude 7.6 quake.

ON DEC. 4, 1811, an enormous cataclysm shook the central United States. It happened again six weeks later, on Jan. 23, and again Feb. 7. Most scientists say that each of the three had magnitudes approaching or above 8.0, stronger than the 1906 San Francisco earthquake - stronger, in fact, than any California earthquake in recorded history. Vibrations from the quakes toppled chimneys hundreds of miles away, cracked sidewalks in Cleveland, rang church bells in Boston and caused the Mississippi to run backward.

Pundits worry that the cartooning of catastrophe in movies, television and popular culture will desensitize the mass audience to real-life calamities. I think the reverse is true. After the volcanoes of movies like Dante's Peak and Volcano, the epochal temblor of Earthquake, the tornadoes in Twister, or most recently and spectacularly, the dawn of a new Ice Age in The Day After Tomorrow, the footage of disasters like the South Asian earthquake and tsunami is even more harrowing and thought-provoking to viewers of 24-hour news channels.

TEHRAN, Iran - Iran is considering moving its capital from Tehran after the earthquake last month that devastated the southern city of Bam, killing more than one-third of the population there. Tehran is on a major seismological fault, and experts have long warned that an earthquake here could be catastrophic. Tehran has a population of more than 12 million and is one of the most earthquake-prone regions in the country. The head of the country's Supreme National Security Council, Hassan Rowhani, told Iranian state television that the idea of moving the capital was being studied by the council and that a decision would be reached by the end of March, which is the end of the Iranian calendar year.

MEXICO CITY - President Vicente Fox declared a state of emergency yesterday in Colima, a coastal state hit overnight by a powerful earthquake that rolled across Central Mexico from the Pacific Ocean, killing at least 25 people and rattling millions in Mexico City. Red Cross officials reported 22 deaths in Colima, where 166 homes were badly damaged or destroyed, two more deaths in the neighboring state of Jalisco, and one in the state of Michoacan, to the west. Most of the dead lived in adobe buildings, and most were very poor, very old or very young, officials said.