5.4: The Impacts of Earthquakes
- Page ID
- 33116
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Some of the common impacts of earthquakes include structural damage to buildings, fires, damage to bridges and highways, slope failures, liquefaction and tsunami. The types of impacts will depend to a large degree on the type of area where the earthquake is located: whether it is predominantly urban or rural, densely or sparsely populated, highly developed or under-developed, and of course on the ability of the infrastructure to withstand shaking.
Ground Shaking
As we’ve seen from the example of the 1985 Mexico earthquake, the geological foundations on which structures are built can have a significant impact on earthquake shaking. In many cases the soft sediments amplify the seismic shaking, so it is very common to see much worse earthquake damage in areas underlain by soft sediments than in areas of solid rock. A good example of this is in the Oakland area near to San Francisco, where parts of a two-layer highway built on soft sediments collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake (Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\)).
Building damage is also worse in areas of soft sediments, and multi-story buildings tend to be more seriously damaged than smaller ones. Buildings can be designed to withstand most earthquakes, and this practice is increasingly applied in earthquake-prone regions. Turkey is one such region, and even though Turkey had a relatively strong building code in the 1990s, adherence to the code was weak, as builders did whatever they could to save costs, including using inappropriate materials in concrete and reducing the amount of steel reinforcing. The result was that there were over 17,000 deaths in the M7.6 1999 Izmit earthquake (Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\)). After two devastating earthquakes in 1999 Turkish authorities strengthened the building code, but the new code has only been applied in a few regions, and enforcement of the code is still weak, as revealed by the amount of damage from a M7.1 earthquake in eastern Turkey in 2011.
Fire
Fires are commonly associated with earthquakes because gas pipelines get ruptured and electrical lines get damaged when the ground shakes. Most of the damage in the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake was caused by massive fires in the downtown area of the city (Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\)). Some 25,000 buildings were destroyed by those fires, which were fueled by broken gas pipes. Fighting the fires was difficult because water mains were also ruptured. The risk of fires can be reduced through P-wave early warning systems if utility operators can reduce pipeline pressure and close electrical circuits.
Slope Failure
Earthquakes are important triggers for failures on slopes that are already prone to weakness. An example is the Las Colinas slide in the city of Santa Tecla, El Salvador, which was triggered by a M7.6 offshore earthquake in January 2001 (Figure \(\PageIndex{4}\)).
Liquefaction
Ground shaking during an earthquake can be enough to weaken rock and unconsolidated materials to the point of failure, but in many cases the shaking also contributes to a process known as liquefaction, in which an otherwise solid body of sediment gets transformed into a liquid mass that can flow. When water-saturated sediments are shaken the grains become rearranged to the point where they are no longer supporting one-another. Instead, the water between the grains is holding them apart and the material can flow. Liquefaction can lead to the collapse of buildings and other structures that might be otherwise undamaged. A good example is the collapse of apartment buildings during the 1964 Niigata earthquake (M7.6) in Japan (Figure \(\PageIndex{5}\)). Liquefaction can also contribute to slope failures and to fountains of sandy mud (sand “volcanoes”) in areas where there is loose saturated sand beneath a layer of more cohesive clay.
Liquefaction risk is greatest where the loose sediments are saturated with water, and this applies to near-shore areas along coastlines.
Tsunami
Earthquakes that take place beneath the ocean have the potential to generate tsunamis (very large waves) under certain conditions. The most likely situation for a significant tsunami is a large (M7 or greater) subduction-related earthquake. As shown on Figure \(\PageIndex{6}\), during the time between earthquakes the overriding plate gets slowly distorted by elastic deformation; it is squeezed laterally (Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\)B) and it is pushed up. When an earthquake happens that deformed crust springs back, resulting in either rapid subsidence of the sea floor, rapid uplift of the seafloor, or both.
Subduction earthquakes with magnitude less than 7 do not typically generate significant tsunami because the amount of vertical displacement of the sea floor is minimal. Seafloor transform earthquakes, even large ones (M7 to 8), don’t typically generate tsunami either, because the motion is mostly side-to-side, and not vertical. And, of course, earthquakes that take place entirely on land don’t generate tsunami.
Tsunami waves travel at velocities of several hundred km/h and easily make it to the far side of an ocean in about the same time as a passenger jet. The simulated one shown on Figure \(\PageIndex{7}\), is like that created by the January 1700 Cascadia earthquake off the coast of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon, which was recorded in Japan 9 hours later.
In many earthquake events the damage and loss of life from a tsunami is much greater than those from the earthquake shaking. This certainly applies to the massive (M9.1) 2004 Sumatra earthquake and tsunami, for which the death toll was well over 200,000. An example of the damage from that event is shown of Figure \(\PageIndex{8}\). In fact, there is no certainty about the proportion of deaths related to shaking and building collapse versus those from the tsunami because many of the buildings in coastal areas that might have collapsed in the shaking were soon destroyed by the waves.
Approximately 16,000 of the deaths from Japan’s 2011 Tohoku earthquake were a result of drowning or in some other way related to the tsunami, while about 3000 are described as being related to the earthquake. Most of the damage to structures was also caused by the tsunami, including the devastating damage to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station.[1]
Media Attributions
- Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Nimitz Freeway by Joe Lewis, 1989, CC BY SA 2.0, via Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/sanbeiji/220646891
- Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): Collapsed buildings, US Geological Survey public domain image, https://gallery.usgs.gov/media/galle...9-izmit-turkey
- Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): San Francisco Fire, 1906, public domain image via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/F..._fire_1906.jpg
- Figure \(\PageIndex{4}\): El Salvador Slide, Public domain US Geological Survey image via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/F...vadorslide.jpg
- Figure \(\PageIndex{5}\): Liquefaction at Niigata, public domain image via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/F...at_Niigata.JPG
- Figure \(\PageIndex{6}\): Steven Earle, CC BY 4.0
- Figure \(\PageIndex{7}\): Tsunami from the 1700 Cascadia Earthquake simulated model,Public domain image, NOAA/PMEL/Center for Tsunami Research, http://nctr.pmel.noaa.gov/cascadia_simulated/
- Figure \(\PageIndex{8}\): Tsunami damage to a Community in Aceh, Indonesia, Public domain image, US Navy, https://nara.getarchive.net/media/a-...sumatra-86b33f
- International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) (2011). Japanese Earthquake Update [Alert Log]. (19 March 2011, 4:30 UTC). https://web.archive.org/web/20110607.../press/?p=1463 ↵