Earthquake & Engineering

This is the Hot Topic of the Town after the Sichuan Event

something on ENGINEERING...
The design code in China is quite well established and there are even provincial code to suit local condition.

The problem is, if these regulations and requirements are being properly implemented from design to construction??

Some of my observations from previous work in China.
This may not reveal the entire picture of the current situation in China but worth a thorough thought:
(1) local designers are used to adopt 'rule of thumb' design, even sophisticated modelling and design can be made with the use of computer softwares;
(2) moral of semi-professionals/supervision staff are questionable. i think this applies to other industry too;
(3) unskilled construction labours and supervisory staff and they have no idea (or even wrong idea) on the engineering principles, their negligance to work cautiously in some critical tasks may be fatal;
(4) sacrifice of quality and safety in order to meet impossible target completion or minimize budgets (for most of the time), it's probably one of the drawbacks of the country's economy boom

The root of the problem maybe... the overall ethical value of the people need to be enhanced, which was being destroyed two decades ago...

something on EARTHQUAKE...
From a geologist's point of view, earthquake of large magnitude is not rare and it's recurring

We can never tell where exactly will earthquake happen, though we already have a better idea on how tectonic plates move relative to each other...
(Just like we know where the fault is but it is rather an influence zone, not just along one plane of weakness, and the way of fault effect varies...)

If you would like to know more about Earthquake please click here (Courtesy of chiuchiu)

I cannot explain so much in detail regarding this issue... and suddenly find my knowledge on plate tectonics is depleting
I used to like plate tectonics so much...

I'm moving towards the extreme of Practical Engineering Geologist... :P