More than 8,500 die as quake in China levels buildings

I wonder when Gore is going to comment on this one too?
Surely earhquakes are also getting worst because of global warming, climate change, or whatever they call it this week.

No, but you will continue to make ignorant comments about global warming, whether there are earthquakes or none. 8,500 people are dead and your reaction is that it must be political.

No one is lost. Just look under the rubble if you want to find them. While 10 000 dead is a large loss of life elsewhere, these numbers are pretty small in China, considering everything else that can kill you there......including the government.

I think what we will find are some more building inspectors and construction managers who are killed because they skimmed on materials. I've always suspected Chinese inferstructure being weak because of the corruption problem and my bet is that this will prove it.

Really, you don't think it had anything to do with the fact that it was an earthquake? That's enough to level any kind of structure that isn't built for earthquakes.

There have been other places that have had similar sized quakes and shared borders. On one side of the border, where building codes were adhered to and enforced, damage was minimal and injuries were few(one person died of a heart attack). Yet on the other side, where the opposite was true, damage was horrendous and loss of life terrible. This happened in Eilat in November of 1995.
The National Building Research Institute at the Haifa Technion reported that a law passed in Israel in 1975 (and since amended) sets building standards that, if followed, can prevent most injuries in a tremor. According to the Israel Association of Engineers and Builders, the newer buildings in Israel met standards identical to those in another quake-prone area, California. It was an adherence to these standards that saved Israel the damage suffered in Egypt and Jordan.
While the quake experienced in the area was a 7.2, weaker than the Chinese quake, it still proves that applying and strictly enforcing strict building codes in quake prone zones does work.
China like much of the Third World (Taiwan included)is rife with corruption within the construction industry and has a plethora of unsafe buildings. There were several incidences here in the quake of 9-21-99 where old newspapers, oil cans and chicken wire(definitely not up to CRSI standards, unless chicken wire now comes in Grade 60 or 75 and is made of carbon steel or low alloy steel) were used in constructing buildings that collapsed, rather than rebar and properly mixed concrete.
So while some buildings would have come down regardless of materials or standards, in a quake of that magnitude, many came down because they were built by people cutting corners using substandard materials.

While there is incredible corruption, the most likely cause for building collaspe is that these buildings were probaly never designed to withstand such strong earthquakes. Most residential buildings in developed countries can't survive earthquakes like this.

My point was not that these buildings fell down because of poor construction but that the poor construction will now visable. I doubt any general building code would survive an earthquake of that magnitude.

That whole region is on a fault line but it makes you wonder if the nearby 3 gorges damn had effects.

I'll bet you just about every Western country did the same exact thing.

Good construction or not, that was not the reason why those buildings fell. Mother nature is purely to blame here.

part of good building standards allows for buildings to edure or sustain damage in such a way that some integrity is maintained minimizing damage and loss of life, much like a car in an collision. The damage experienced in this region was exacerbated by sub standard codes and materials.