The images of March 11's earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan -- landscapes awash in flaming debris, cars piled up in parking lots like toys, industrial facilities exploding amid dense black smoke -- are staggering. But what's actually most amazing is that things aren't worse; the death toll, while horrific, is orders of magnitude less than the far less geophysically impressive earthquake in Haiti last year. FP spoke with Michael K. Lindell, an urban planning professor at Texas A&M University and a leading expert in the field of earthquake response -- who, as it happened, was at a meeting of the U.S. government's multi-agency earthquake planning group when we called. He explained why the Japanese are better than everyone else at planning for earthquakes, how real estate developers are hurting the United States' ability to withstand similar tremors, and why earthquake experts are more interested in what's in local building codes than what's on CNN right now.
Foreign Policy: So you're at a gathering of earthquake experts who just happen to be meeting on the day of the largest earthquake in recorded Japanese history.
Michael K. Lindell: Right.
FP: What's the conversation like?
ML: For people who do earthquakes and other hazards for a living, the occurrence of any one event isn't really news. It's news in the sense that it was that magnitude in that place, but we knew sooner or later it was going to happen. One of the things we're trying to do is push the focus away from response and recovery to mitigation and preparedness.
FP: What separates a terrible earthquake from a bad one? What are the factors that matter here?
ML: Being in a bad location makes a lot of difference -- if you're on a fault line that's been locked up for a long time, as we've seen in Japan today and in Chile last year. So, given that you're in a bad location, what do you do about it? That really makes the difference between a Haiti and a Chile. Because the earthquake in Haiti had about between five and 10 times the economic impact and about 500 times the casualties as the earthquake in Chile, even though the one in Chile was orders of magnitude more intense.
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A number of things made the difference. The first is that you've got maps. They know where the faults are; they know where the problem areas are: not just on the faults, but on bad soils that are prone to liquefaction -- basically, it just turns to quicksand. And once you've got the maps, you've also got the building codes, the risk information getting out to people -- how do you build buildings so you avoid collapses? So you have steel-reinforced structures, rather than just masonry, bricks. Once a building starts shaking side to side, unreinforced masonry is terrible.
Even if you put that kind of stuff in the codes, you can always make a building cheaper by not putting in the steel reinforcing. So what you need to do is make sure the local jurisdiction has effective building inspections. And not everybody wants to have strong building codes -- it's cheaper to build if the building codes are weak. That means you can sell houses cheaper; you can get more people to buy your houses. In Texas, just before an increase in the building code requirements that was imposed by the Texas Department of Insurance, there was a big run on building permits -- because all of the builders wanted to lock in their permit applications under the old, less stringent codes, which would keep their costs down. It's like, why are you in a hurry to kill your customers? But obviously, they don't see it that way.
FP: How does Japan rate in this regard?
ML: They are in better shape than we [Americans] are in terms of how their buildings are constructed. We have variation in the United States -- our best by far for building codes is California. Japan had the kind of preparedness for the tsunami that they needed. The reports we've gotten so far are that, given the distance from the earthquake epicenter and the quality of the construction, that there was not a lot of earthquake damage in Tokyo and the other major cities.
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