6.1 Aftershock hits Haiti...

[Rolfe]

Earthquakes don't kill people. Collapsing buildings kill people.

Rolfe.

 

[Sam.I.Am]

The 89 quake was epicentered near a sparsely populated part of the Santa Cruz mountains. That's around 60 miles away from San Francisco. The Haitian quake was about 15 miles away from Port au Prince. The Northridge quake was directly beneath a well populated area.

 

[cwalner]

The 89 quake was epicentered near a sparsely populated part of the Santa Cruz mountains. That's around 60 miles away from San Francisco. The Haitian quake was about 15 miles away from Port au Prince. The Northridge quake was directly beneath a well populated area.

Still in both cases we are talking about less than 100 deaths versus over 300,000 in Haiti. building safety played a major part.

As an example, I still have the image in my head of the video from the Bay Bridge showing the open panel collapsing and crushing the car beneath it. However, the bridge was designed to specifically fail in that manner to avoid a more catostrophic failure. The result: two carloads of casualties rather than every person on the bridge at the time. Considering that the quake hit during the early part of the evening commute, that could have been a very large number of people.