Saturday, July 6, 2019

After a 7.1 or a 6.4 engineers have to inspect all buildings in that area

There is a lot of time spent by engineers seeing which houses are still safe and which ones have to be condemned and then there are the homes that burn up from when ground moving opens up gas lines so there are gas explosions or fires. In a 7.1 earthquake it is going to throw a lot of houses off their foundations as well, especially older ones not directly strongly attached by bolts set into the cement into their cement foundations or pier block foundations. Slab foundations (with no space under houses or basements are much more common in California simply because of the earthquakes we have here by the way. So, an earthquake might put cracks into a cement slab foundation but it won't collapse into the basement during and earthquake for example. So, there are many many cement slab foundations with no basements or even a crawspace under your home for this reason in California. Sometimes this style is called a "Ranch Style home" where you have a cement slab and no basement.

But, there is also a lot of checking by city and county building inspectors and engineers to see what houses need to be demolished or rebuilt or retrofitted near a quake as big as a 7.1 quake. The laws are very strict in California regarding all this because in the past homes have collapsed on people that thought they were safe when they were no longer structurally safe because of one or more large earthquakes.

The most likely to fall down in an earthquake are really old brick buildings that don't have rebar in the walls to reinforce them. (rebar is a metal iron bar used to reinforce concrete or sometimes bricks) today or sometimes people use them in chimneys ever since the Northridge quake in 1994 where literally every chimney in Northridge came down then.

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