The quake in numbers

Confirmed death toll as of Saturday 2 p.m.: 28,881

Number of injured from quake: 198,347

Number still hospitalized from injuries: 64,040

Allocations in government earthquake relief: $500 million U.S.

Domestic private donations in cash and goods: $454 million US

Emergency supplies already in quake zone: 127,580 tents, 37,700 tents, 170,000 cots

Number of countries offering quake-relief support: 51

Number of medical workers and disease control staff working in quake area: 34,000

Amount of blood at medical stations in quake area: 3.17 million milliliters.

Number of ambulances sent to quake zone: 485

Number of structures destroyed by the quake: 216,000

Number of school buildings destroyed: 6,898.

Number of soldiers, armed police and paramilitary personnel engaged in disaster relief: 130,000.

Sources: Wang Baodong (spokesman of China Embassy in Washington), Xinhua news agency, Ministry of Civil Affairs, Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, and Information Office of the State Council.

Comments

[jeff]

Too many school buildings are destroyed. The builders and local government officials responsible will have to face execution. Parents who lost their sons and daughters will tear those bast*rd into pieces. They are no better than Daliar Lama.

[A B]

Nasty talk like that damage Beijing and China.

When 7,000 school buildings collapse, it is premature to say that it can be entirely blamed on corruption or incompetence.

Building codes and construction techniques should be, and always are, created with a certain safety margin in anticipation of shoddy construction, corrupt building inspectors and contractors, and other factors.

When that many structures fail not only in the epicenter, but further away, it begs the question as to whether there is not significant issues with the basic designs, principles of construction.

Without a doubt there will be corruption and shoddy construction found --- that is the case in almost every case where a event like an earthquake (or storm) stresses a man-made structure.

However, to crassly suggest executing the entire group of officials and contractors responsible is precisely the wrong response.

What that does is to encourage everyone to simply do their best to cover up and deny that they have any role in the disaster.

What is needed is a no-fault, honest, fair, and impartial examination of causes, and in most cases, without pinning fault on individuals, learn the lessons, repair and retrofit the buildings elsewhere that are still in use wherever possible, and to improve new construction.

No doubt there will be a few clearly egregious cases where officials and contractors were clearly responsible, and had they met even a minimum standard, the buildings would have remained standing. That is an argument for a few to be so punished to the full extent of the law.

However, a blame game, finger pointing, and failure to channel the people's anger (whether legitimate or not) is a fine way to ensure that this disaster repeats itself because Chinese engineers, scientists, and builders would not have learned valuable lessons unimpeded by the need to seek revenge.

Let our prayers and grief be expressed in a constructive manner, and let those 20,000 to 50,000 who died not die in vain --- which would be the case if all parties learned nothing and changed nothing from this tragedy.

Let the dead bury their dead.

Let those who want vengeance get it from heaven.

Let those who are living now do their utmost to help the survivors, and to rebuild newer, better, safer for the next generation.

An eye for an eye will only extend this tragedy.

[bemis]

Many thanks as usual, to AB for his compassionate & lucid views & suggestions: focus on rebuilding for the future.

[A B]

The search and rescue mission will be winding down in another week or two, and be replaced with a recovery operation that will go on for months.

The real urgent need now is to bring together the best scientific, engineering and technical minds from around the world to study the collapsed and damaged structures before they are cleared away (and the evidence as to how they failed is destroyed).

What the central government needs to do fairly quickly is to organize a study group that have access to the seismic data for each locality, construction blueprints, details for each site, access to the contractors and officials involved in the construction projects, and particularly, eyewitness accounts of how the structures either failed or how it was able to absorb the forces generated in the earthquake.

The eyewitness accounts are particularly important because that may be the only evidence we have of how the structures “broke”, where, and in what order.

The data need to be gathered for virtually every kind of structure, from buildings to roads to dams to utility pythons / telecoms systems so the maximum “lessons” can be learned about how they broke or survived and how to build better ones in the future.

In the Kobe earthquake in Japan, one major issue is reclaimed land made from landfill which "liquidfied" and collapsed the buildings built atop it regardless of how stout they were built.

There are just so many things that need to be studied, researched, and the facts documented so as the process of coming up with better solutions based on facts can begin.

In parallel with this, detailed studies need to be done on the disaster readiness and performance of the local governments, emergency services and central government agencies, and the People’s Armed Police and People’s Liberation Army to see how their capabilities to bring swift, prompt, and material assistance to victims can be improved, “for the next time”.

The real hard work documenting the facts, coming up with better ideas, learning the lessons and implementing them, has only just begun.

Maybe President Hu and Premier Wen might consider setting up a special commission like the United States did after 9/11 to investigate and recommend improvements / re-organizations of government agencies to better deal with disasters in the future.

Ideally, the studies mentioned above will involve the best scientific and engineering and management talent from around the world so that China can learn from their collective expertise and experience with how to engineer and build and to deal with such disasters.

The last thing China need is to rush to rebuild without thinking through the lessons leaned from this disaster.

[SiberiaTiger]

@A B

I doubt that lack of the expertise was the problem. The skyscrapers in Chengdu were OK, but schools further away collapsed and sometimes buildings around the "Tofu" schools held up.

All you "sophisticated" flower talks are out of touch with the reality. The reality is that the gap between the rich and the poor are huge and most Chinese are poor. The funds for education of the poor are limited and the corruptions sure don't help. The tragedy has nothing to do with architecture expertise of Chinese. It is a mirror reflecting brutally the problems of Chinese society.

I don't see anything wrong with Jeff’s thoughts. The corrupted builders and officials should be executed either by the government or by the people.

[RY]

Most of the comments here are well thought of and expressed. I agree with A B, in the aftermath, it is easy to blame and point fingers be it natural or man-made disasters like Katrina or Sub-prime mortgage mess.
I was fortunately enough to have been involved with few large scale developments both in China and California. I agree there are huge discrepnecies in design and construction standards beteen the rich and poor cities and countries. It is a matter of economy and investment return. China do have the know how on building world class buildings, it is evidnet in first tier cities like Shanghai and Beijing.
I also beleive City of Chengdu was going through massive planning and zoing exercise, a US deisgn firm was selected for the project about a year ago. Now they have a clean slate to rebuild the quake zone, proper zoning/planning and code enforcement is critical, like SF after 1903 quake and fire that wiped out the whole city.
They can also model after CA as all hopsitals and emergency centers have a importance factor of 2.5+, they can be operational immediately after a 8.0 mag quake. All k-12 school are wood framed and or low rise.
Bottom line is hope the govement chalked it up as lessons learned.

[A B]

Wood framed designs for schools will probably not work in China as it is too expensive a building material compared to concrete reinforced steel.

Low rises might also run into the land availability issue.

I myself am in favor in studying earthquake resistant designs based on principles of shock absorption / energy dissipation and designs for "soft" failures as the structure hits its design limits.

That is something that might be better suited to China were the additional cost of such buildings are mostly in labor and a bit more material, rather than to build with much more expensive and larger quantities of materials as you would a world class steel high rise building.

If you look at how building codes gradually evolved and changed in places --- there is never a perfect set --- it goes along as lessons are learned. For example, look at how many homes were lost to hurricanes in the US before builders figured out inexpensive things like a hurricane strap (a thin metal strip) can keep the roof from blowing off for about $5 in incremental costs per strap.

For those who think it is all because of shoddy construction because of differences in wealth, go and ask yourself why there is not a requirement for, and virtually no concrete and steel houses on the hurricane prone coastal areas of the US. The dominant construction method is wood framed and they are not about to change it even after devastating losses over the last 5 years.

So don't just blame it on rich and poor --- the real poor live in shacks that actually might have done quite well in the quake.

[A B]

For those who think Japan did a lot better.... here is a paper that might raise some eyebrows:

http://www.rcs.arch.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/otani/JSPS_London99.pdf

As you can see, they concluded that there is a lot they learned from the quake... like heavy roofs that give comfort in summer heat and protect from annual typhoons became a liability when a quake struck. But the last quake was 400 years ago.

Other interesting points include the weakest part of many concrete buildings being the first floor -- used as garages, etc. and thus, were poorly braced against earthquakes, so the upper stories collapsed on top of it (even though it stayed intact). Or how steel buildings tended to fail at the welds which are much weaker than the steel.

Many, many lessons....

[Dan Harris]

Wow. Wow.

[Karen Williams]

Gee, AB...I am duly impressed with your wealth of information in re: to post seismic event rebuilding and the "what went wrong?" questions. Do you do studies on this professionally? I'm NOT being facetious.
Respectfully,
Karen

[Reinhard Heydrich]

What is everyone worried about? The Chinese don't care about you Amerikaners. A few thousand less Untermensh is good.

[A B]

@Karen

What I do professionally is a rather, grin, long question.

No, I am not a civil engineer, but some aspects of what I do touch on facilities, including assessing what happened after the Taiwan earthquake of 1999.

If you will let me know what your email is, I will be glad to fill you in on what I actually do.

[A B]

Here is an interesting article about what happened to American donations...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/22/AR2008052204116.html