A 6.4 magnitude earthquake in Taiwan left most buildings unscathed because they had been designed and constructed carefully to withstand earthquakes. But one building, a seventeen floor apartment block was known to have been poorly constructed and its collapse, like an accordion, has left 24 dead and roughly a 100 missing in the rubble.
Cutting costs seems to be behind the poor construction with the BBC finding polystyrene and tin cans had been used to reinforce the concrete, a known technique for scrimping on costs.
Geographers who study how people learn to live with earthquakes often discover that it’s about clever construction and the investment in these earthquake proof buildings that can often mean the difference of large death counts or just a few injuries in these large earthquakes.
