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The struggle to understand why earthquakes happen in America's heartland

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Re: The struggle to understand why earthquakes happen in America's heartland

#11

Post by lupusreal »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #10
doe_eyes wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the outcome you're hoping for, though? It's not useful for people to live with vague anxiety. Are there specific solutions we want them to pursue, and that aren't being handled by the government?

Well, some bridge maintenance would be nice. Additional work to strengthen highway passes, communication infrastructure, government owned buildings...maybe some seismic engineering or reinforcement done on the unreinforced masonry elementary schools, some of which (in Seattle) were last touched in the 1990s. On an individual level, homes built before 1980 should be updated to meet modern earthquake foundation codes.…

Bridge maintenance is sorely needed across the whole country.

Anyway, the reason this stuff doesn't get enough funding is because the process of sorting out public spending priorities is called politics. Everybody has their own idea about what needs money and how much money should be thrown around. There's no objectively correct way to sort it all out, no means by which we can weigh the relative merits of increased library funding against retrofitting single family homes against earthquakes except by asking people which they prefer. And different people have different tolerance for risk, somebody who decided to tolerate the risk of a major earthquake sometime in the next X years because they'd rather fund some other project isn't necessarily wrong. It's not a matter of simply educating people about the risk (and FWIW, the average person in Seattle is definitely aware that the region is geologically risky.)

Re: The struggle to understand why earthquakes happen in America's heartland

#12

Post by antonvs »

coding123 wrote: post #5
jmward01 wrote: post #3

What does it take to convince people to take risks like this seriously? The challenge is that hypothetical risks 'sometime in the next 50+ years' don't convince people to do things, at least in the US. The pacific northwest is at a much higher risk from an array of faults (not just the cascadia subduction zone) and volcanic hazards but even there, where the risks are very well understood, getting a large region to ta…

Most people don't want to live afraid of everything. I learned that lesson in the past 3 years.

You've erased a lot of nuance there between two very different situations.

Re: The struggle to understand why earthquakes happen in America's heartland

#13

Post by lupusreal »

shiroiushi wrote: post #7
doe_eyes wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the outcome you're hoping for, though? It's not useful for people to live with vague anxiety. Are there specific solutions we want them to pursue, and that aren't being handled by the government?

He's probably hoping for emergency preparedness, like any sensible person. That would include stronger building codes, evacuation plans and facilities, emergency supplies, etc. Here in Japan, we have all that stuff, and we don't live with "vague anxiety" (certainly nothing like the high anxiety that most Americans live with these days). Big earthquakes are rare, but smaller ones are very common, but everything in soc…

If the matter rarely being a problem is the bar to meet, then Japan and Seattle have both met that bar. Seattle is less prepared but the quakes of note are also more rare, so both meet the "rarely causes problems" standard.

It wouldn't make sense for every place to prepare as much as Japan for things that are less likely there than in Japan. Does Japan have as many tornado shelters as Kansas? Probably not.

Re: The struggle to understand why earthquakes happen in America's heartland

#16

Post by lenerdenator »

> In Tennessee, jurisdictions can decide whether to opt in to building codes with earthquake provisions, while other states — like Missouri — don’t have state-wide building codes at all, though there are efforts to change that.

I live on the other side of the state from New Madrid and can tell you, there's a 0% chance the Missouri state legislature passes a bill requiring earthquake proofing of buildings. You'd have an unending stream of people from outstate explaining how their little country town just can't afford to meet such codes, that it's government overreach, that the next quake could be hundreds of years from now... it'd never end. They're far, far more likely to pass a law saying cities like Kansas City and St. Louis can't force seismic-aware building codes on citizens.

Re: The struggle to understand why earthquakes happen in America's heartland

#17

Post by lenerdenator »

jmward01 wrote: post #3

What does it take to convince people to take risks like this seriously? The challenge is that hypothetical risks 'sometime in the next 50+ years' don't convince people to do things, at least in the US. The pacific northwest is at a much higher risk from an array of faults (not just the cascadia subduction zone) and volcanic hazards but even there, where the risks are very well understood, getting a large region to ta…

It's like everything else: it comes down to money.

People who don't have much of it (which is to say, most of the area in the New Madrid seismic zone) don't want to spend it on something that might happen at some completely unpredictable time in the future. They don't want the government telling them to do it, either, because in their minds, that's the government telling them to spend money they don't have.

More money == more interest in long-term preservation.

Re: The struggle to understand why earthquakes happen in America's heartland

#18

Post by cloudwalk9 »

lupusreal wrote: post #11
lazyasciiart wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, some bridge maintenance would be nice. Additional work to strengthen highway passes, communication infrastructure, government owned buildings...maybe some seismic engineering or reinforcement done on the unreinforced masonry elementary schools, some of which (in Seattle) were last touched in the 1990s. On an individual level, homes built before 1980 should be updated to meet modern earthquake foundation codes.…

Bridge maintenance is sorely needed across the whole country. Anyway, the reason this stuff doesn't get enough funding is because the process of sorting out public spending priorities is called politics. Everybody has their own idea about what needs money and how much money should be thrown around. There's no objectively correct way to sort it all out, no means by which we can weigh the relative merits of increased l…

> Bridge maintenance is sorely needed across the whole country.

Not just that, but also to rethink how we reinforce them in major waterways or even minor but navigable waterways, if any heavy enough boat can just crash into a support column and take the whole thing down... albeit accidentally in that case.

Re: The struggle to understand why earthquakes happen in America's heartland

#19

Post by throwaway173738 »

lenerdenator wrote: post #17
jmward01 wrote: post #3

What does it take to convince people to take risks like this seriously? The challenge is that hypothetical risks 'sometime in the next 50+ years' don't convince people to do things, at least in the US. The pacific northwest is at a much higher risk from an array of faults (not just the cascadia subduction zone) and volcanic hazards but even there, where the risks are very well understood, getting a large region to ta…

It's like everything else: it comes down to money. People who don't have much of it (which is to say, most of the area in the New Madrid seismic zone) don't want to spend it on something that might happen at some completely unpredictable time in the future. They don't want the government telling them to do it, either, because in their minds, that's the government telling them to spend money they don't have. More mone…

So you can see how a living wage and parity for tipped professions is actually in the national interest.

Re: The struggle to understand why earthquakes happen in America's heartland

#20

Post by lenerdenator »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #19
lenerdenator wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like everything else: it comes down to money. People who don't have much of it (which is to say, most of the area in the New Madrid seismic zone) don't want to spend it on something that might happen at some completely unpredictable time in the future. They don't want the government telling them to do it, either, because in their minds, that's the government telling them to spend money they don't have. More mone…

So you can see how a living wage and parity for tipped professions is actually in the national interest.

Exactly. The problem is, you will have to take money from some parts of the country to subsidize places like the Missouri Bootheel if you wish to see these sorts of improvements made, at least for a few decades. The engine for economic growth simply isn't there. Kansas City and St. Louis make up somewhere between 75-90% of the state gross product. Springfield and Columbia make up a little bit of the difference. The entire rest of the state by land area makes up less than 10%.
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