Earthquake

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.

LOS ANGELES -- For 11-year-old Greg Jackson, the return to school was filled with anxious anticipation.Like many of the nearly 600,000 students who returned to Los Angeles public schools yesterday, Greg had mixed feelings -- excited about seeing classmates but also fearing another earthquake would strike while he was at school."

Well, that was different. It's not every day that the Mid-Atlantic experiences a magnitude 5.8 earthquake, but that 10 seconds of shake, rattle and roll you felt this afternoon wasn't a train, a hurricane or the sound of budget negotiations in Washington. It was the real thing. By the standards of earthquake hotspots around the world, a 5.8 is a minor amusement. The earthquake that rocked Japan this year hit 9.0, meaning it released about 63,000 times as much energy. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there are about 1,300 earthquakes a year worldwide that register between 5.0 and 5.9. The agency tracks about 50 earthquakes a day. For the East Coast, though, 5.8 was enough to overload telephone networks and send crowds pouring into the streets for fear that office buildings were in danger of imminent collapse.

As of the end of  the week, we've been looking down the barrel of a powerful named storm, the kind that cause flooding, power outages and general mayhem in these parts. No one can predict what the storm named Irene has in store for Harford County. It may end up among the names people talk about for generations, or it might be just another cyclone that turned out to sea. Hurricanes are notoriously unpredictable that way. Regardless of how, or if, we end up remembering Irene, it'll be a long time before anyone forgets this week's other display of nature's power: the rare East Coast earthquake with a magnitude of 5.8 that was centered in Virginia, but proved disruptive from the Carolinas to Canada.

Your March 2, front page article "Mayhem in Post-Quake Chile," with the sad picture of a devastated mother and child and cover story about the 720 killed, rampant looting and overall devastation caused by the earthquake, was certainly heart wrenching and calls our attention to the terrible suffering of others. But how can America continue with more foreign aid when so many of our tax dollars have already been used for the people hit by the Haiti earthquake and at a time when our own economy is crashing down on us?

We were in high day-before-the-move-gear on Tuesday. I was in the Rodgers Forge house where my sister moved on Wednesday, when I felt a heavy thud. I thought the two men who had come to clean the rug had turned on the nozzle from their truck full throttle and the vibration was the jolt I felt.   The rug cleaners thought the painters had dropped something heavy or broken through a wall. “It's an earthquake,” I heard one of them say. “I saw the bushes move.” Within seconds, several of the men had received cell phone calls from their spouses.

The earthquake that killed more than 4,000 people in Japan this week reverberated a bit in Columbia as well, stirring a minister and his Japanese-born wife to launch an effort to send aid to her country.The Rev. James M. Shields and his wife, Seiko, plan to collect money Sunday from the more than 600 members of the Christ Episcopal Church in Owen Brown, the county's oldest congregation."We'll collect as much as possible," Mr. Shields, 63, said in his church office yesterday. "It's not a one-time thing."

The worst time to throw a junk food social for your colleagues is during an earthquake. In her farewell column , Laura Vozzella mentioned that I was setting up for a Junk Food Social when the earthquake hit. Stupid planet ruined my party. The new Golden Oreos Fudge Cremes were a big hit. Andy Rosen brought Fruity Pebbles and Golden Grahams. Michael Sragow contributed a new kind of Buffalo Wings Pringles. Erik Maza showed up with Nutella. The party was cancelled but the salty and sweet treats nourished the newsroom, and Vozzella promised me she was relieved not to be the center of attention.

Two earthquakes topped 6 on the Richter Scale on Thursday. The stronger was under the Pacific Ocean floor, 50 miles west and south of the Mexican coast. No one felt it.The weaker was below south-central Indian cotton and sugar cane fields. It was the worst catastrophe from an earthquake since the Iran quake of June 1990. It had the greatest death toll in historic India since the Quetta quake in what is now Pakistan in 1935, possibly the most awful ever within the current borders of India.

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.