On Friday, the death toll of the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that shook parts of southern Turkey and northern Syria nearly three weeks ago surpassed 50,000.
The scale of the destruction, and the stomach-churning number of lives lost as a result of it, has been widely attributed to poorly-enforced building codes. In the affected regions, outdated structures and poor regulatory supervision meant that under the stress of a massive quake, many buildings simply pancaked, crushing those inside.
Those failures of oversight show how the existence of a building code—even one that sufficiently outlines necessary steps to ensure that structures can withstand massive earthly tremors—is not, in and of itself, protective. Even the best codes are useless if no one follows them.
You’d think we might have figured this out by now.
Building codes aren’t all that new. In fact, they date back over three millennia. In the 18th century BCE, the Code of Hammurabi laid out some (admittedly fairly crude) stipulations for ancient Babylonian builders. “If [a builder] does not succeed, and the house falls in, killing the owner, the builder will be killed,” it read, adding for good measure, “If the son of the owner dies, the son of the builder shall be killed.”
While King Hammurabi wasn’t necessarily thinking about plate tectonics, his Chinese counterparts were. 2500 years ago, during the Shang dynasty, builders deliberately employed methods to mitigate earthquake damage by using wooden joints (which provide flexibility) rather than brittle nails (which are more likely to snap), and evenly spacing out load-bearing posts to better distribute weight.
Modern architects and policy makers have taken geophysics into consideration while crafting building regulations for well over a century.
After several strong quakes struck 19th-century Italy (first in the inland town of Norcia in 1859, and then on the island of Ischia, just off the coast from Naples, in 1883), the newly-unified state adopted building laws that would promote safer construction methods and, hopefully, limit the destruction that such events could cause. (See this report on the Ischia earthquake published in Nature in 1883).
Those codes were amended and improved over the course of the twentieth century. But still, Italy’s regulations have only ever applied to new construction, meaning residents of centuries-old buildings in medieval villages remain at risk. That vulnerability reared its ugly head in 2016, when a 6.2 magnitude earthquake with nearly-as-strong aftershocks rattled the central Apennine range (not a decade after a similar earthquake killed 300 people in Abruzzo in 2009).
It isn’t true that all medieval structures are liable to seismic collapse. In Liechtenstein, which sits atop active fault lines, older buildings’ foundations are separated from walls and rooves, which actually makes them safer in the event of a large quake. But buildings haven’t been built that way for centuries, and almost certainly weren’t constructed as such in order to save sixteenth-century Liechtensteiners from tectonic dangers.
During the 20th century, advances in seismic engineering in the 1950s and 1960s provided ways for structures to be horizontally reinforced in order to withstand the lateral, back-and-forth waves of motion that earthquakes provoke, and that cause the most damage. New codes were drafted to reflect scientific progress, but have often been applied reactively and haphazardly.
For instance, following China’s disastrous 1976 Tangshan earthquake that killed over 240,000 people and levelled eight schools, Beijing laid out new building codes that incorporated the newest advances in seismic technology. And yet, the rules were only really enforced in wealthier and more urban parts of the country. For decades, inspectors barely investigated structural safety in rural in China, and in 2008, a 7.9 quake killed 90,000 people in Sichuan province.
Negligent building methods can be especially harmful in areas that experience widespread poverty. In 2013, unenforced codes were once again cited as the reason a 6.6 mag event in China’s poorer Gansu province was so devastating. In Haiti, cheap construction methods paired with underfunded health care, power, and road infrastructure meant that at least 220,000 people lost their lives following a massive temblor in 2010.
In California, where I live, the first building codes emerged in the years following the 1906 earthquake that levelled much of downtown San Francisco. The resultant 1909 Tenement House Act became the state’s first law outlining safety standards for built structures with the intention of safeguarding the health and wellbeing of their inhabitants, although the law was mostly focused on air and ventilation. Still, as historian John Baranski tells it, the state allocated barely any resources to its enforcement, meaning that “virtually no inspectors could be hired.”
It wasn’t until 1933, after the 6.3 magnitude Long Beach earthquake, that the state of California explicitly incorporated earthquake safety into its codes. But the Field Act only applied to public schools—meaning that private construction projects weren’t really required to incorporate seismic considerations at all.
In the decades that followed, the expansion of state-wide codes came largely via hindsight. In 1971, new regulations were drawn up after the San Fernando Valley’s Sylmar earthquake levelled four hospitals. In 1991, codes were expanded after the 6.9 Loma Prieta quake rattled San Francisco’s East Bay, collapsing a section of the Bay Bridge and postponing the locally-explosive A’s vs. Giants World Series.
Today, cracks in physical and regulatory foundations make it clear that California’s building codes remain insufficient to protect residents of from a major event akin to the one that recently struck Turkey and Syria. For decades, Los Angeles city officials ignored calls to improve the safety of concrete buildings constructed during the 1950s and 1960s, despite pushes from the scientific community. In San Francisco, a leaning tower serves as a reminder of the speed with which ritzy (yet structurally questionable) skyscrapers have been erected in the aftermath of the tech boom, while the existence of thousands of buildings made with non-ductile concrete—the same material that caused so many structures in Turkey to ‘pancake’—make events occurring half a world away feel much closer to home. City planners and public safety officers know about the problem, but movement towards a full-scale retrofitting program has been sluggish at best.
With non-compliant buildings in our neighborhoods and ‘The Big One’ looming, it can be difficult for Californians not to feel like we are waiting our turn to become the newest chapter in the history of earthquakes and (neglected) building codes.