China earthquake brings faulty school design to the fore
By Andrew C. Revkin The enormous loss of life in collapsed schools around China's quake-stricken Sichuan Province could have been significantly reduced using known methods for designing or retrofitting structures in earthquake zones, several experts on global hazards said.
But China is just one of many countries with known earthquake vulnerability that has been slow to transform schools - a keystone of any community - from potential death traps into havens, these experts and some community campaigners for school safety said.
Hundreds of students are thought to have perished in schools during the earthquake.
Experts on earthquake dangers have warned for years that tens of millions of students in thousands of schools, from Asia to the Americas, face similar risks, yet programs to reinforce existing schools or require that new ones be built to extra-sturdy standards are inconsistent, slow and inadequately financed.
While earthquakes can sometimes exact a far wider toll on other public buildings, school collapses are particularly wrenching, development officials and experts say, because students are often what propel a struggling nation from poverty to prosperity.
In 2004, the 30-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a study, "Keeping Schools Safe in Earthquakes," concluding that schools "routinely" collapsed in earthquakes around the world because of avoidable design or construction errors, or because existing laws and building codes were not enforced.
"Unless action is taken immediately to address this problem, much greater loss of life and property will occur," the report says.
The risks are growing, experts say, as populations in poor regions continue to rise and the world, rich and poor, shifts ever more toward urban centers, many with well-charted seismic threats.
In recent years, there have been deadly school collapses after earthquakes in Italy, Algeria, Morocco and Turkey. Most notably, in Pakistan on Oct. 8, 2005, at least 17,000 children died as more than 7,000 schools collapsed after a powerful jolt shook a mountainous region near the Indian border.
Similar risks, and delays in reducing them, exist in countries rich and poor from the Americas across Europe and Asia.
In 2006, Brian Tucker, an earthquake specialist who runs a private group, GeoHazards International, presented a study on schools to the Economic Cooperation Organization, a group of 10 countries in Europe and Asia. The analysis found that 180 million people, including 40 million school-age children, faced "an earthquake risk equal to that of northern Pakistan." Tucker also was a co-author of the 2004 OECD report.
Delays in addressing such threats sometimes result less from financing and engineering than from societal inertia, given competing problems and the unpredictable nature of earthquakes, said Ben Wisner, a former geography professor at California State University, Long Beach, and a founder of the Coalition for Global School Safety.
Often, money and technology are not the issue, he said, so much as access to basic information about risks and simple ways to bolster buildings.
"On the whole, the cost of designing and building a school, say, a three-story junior high school in Mexico City, is only about 5 percent higher," Wisner said. "You don't necessarily design a building to avoid collapse, but design so that it's a survivable collapse. You want large voids so they can be accessed by rescuers."
There have been some successful efforts to reinforce schools, in places including Katmandu, Nepal, and parts of Turkey, he said.
Progress often is a result of persistent pressure by a particular engineer or safety campaigner.
The successes are far outnumbered by places that still face calamity on the scale of that seen in Sichuan, he and others said.
And the risks are not limited to poor or emerging countries. In Vancouver, British Columbia, parents' groups have been agitating to accelerate a decades-long program aimed at bringing schools up to modern earthquake standards.
While there is no reliable global tally of unsafe schools in quake zones, regional snapshots are chillingly clear. A report being presented at an international conference on school safety, coincidentally beginning on Wednesday in Islamabad, says that more than 80 percent of schools in Pakistan are unprotected from shocks like the one in October 2005.
The inertia is one result of a range of factors, including deep poverty in some places and political immobility in others.
"It's so disappointing to see these things happening again and again - little kids caught in a collapsed school building," aid Thomas Parsons, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California.
Around Sichuan, the earthquake may well have raised the danger level on nearby faults, Parsons said, noting a 2007 paper mapping the region's unstable underpinnings.
