Venezuela earthquake: Staggering destruction is urgent warning for California over seismic risk

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Set us as preferred The devastation from two massive earthquakes that struck Venezuela on Wednesday offer a stark warning for California and other seismically vulnerable areas of the toll catastrophic shaking can bring to urban areas.It will take days to assess the full scope of the damage.But videos show horrifying, but now predictable, images of entire blocks flattened and basic infrastructure in shambles.The images of the most severe damage in Venezuela appear to involve the collapse of “non-ductile concrete buildings,” a type of building construction that also exists in California, according to Maria Mohammed, president of the Structural Engineers Assn.

of Southern California.“Looking through the photos that have been coming through the news, it looks like most of the buildings that we’re seeing that have collapsed are non-ductile concrete buildings,” Mohammed said.

This type of concrete building lacks enough steel to keep the brittle concrete in the columns from exploding when shaken in an earthquake.The U.S.Geological Survey has said that non-ductile concrete buildings are one of the building types “most likely to kill people during an earthquake.” The discovery of the fatal flaw behind non-ductile concrete buildings came during the magnitude 6.6 Sylmar earthquake of 1971.

Concrete buildings that collapsed in that earthquake included a 46-year-old Veterans Administration hospital in San Fernando, where 49 people died.More concrete buildings came tumbling down during the magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake of 1994, causing the partial collapse of a Kaiser Permanente building and a Bullock’s department store.

Minimum building requirements have changed in the U.S.since the 1970s to ban construction of non-ductile concrete buildings and to require a better configuration of steel reinforcement to resist ...