Earthquakes don’t kill people – collapsing buildings do. In the last century nearly threequarters of earthquake fatalities have been due to building failure.
Countries such as Japan and Chile have shown it is possible to construct buildings that can withstand the most powerful earthquakes, but such sophisticated engineering is unaffordable in many earthquake-prone countries. Now a group of engineers have come up with an alternative solution that could save millions of lives.
Rather than trying to prevent the building from collapsing, engineer Subhamoy Bhattacharya and his colleagues at the University of Surrey aim to extend the time before the building crumbles, giving people longer to get out.
“If we can extend the time from one second to 15, say, people have a chance,” says Bhattacharya. To achieve this, he encases buildings in a cheap plastic mesh, which acts like a corset, holding walls together even when cracks appear. Ultimately the mesh also fails, but this sticking-plaster solution can hold houses together for a few vital seconds.
Having testing their idea in the lab, Bhattacharya and his colleagues estimate that putting mesh supports around houses would reduce casualties by over 80% during major earthquakes such as the one that struck Nepal in April.
And gradually word is spreading. A number of mud-brick houses in Pakistan have gained mesh corsets. Meanwhile, the National Society for Earthquake Technology has been teaching rural stonemasons in Nepal how to fit corsets and save lives when the next big quake hits.
