Spain earthquake raises questions over building safety

Death toll from country’s worst quakes for 50 years rises to nine as town mayor claims 90% of homes still inhabitable The death toll in Spain’s worst earthquake for 50 years rose to nine on Thursday as questions were raised about how two relatively mild shocks caused such extensive destruction in the eastern town of Lorca. Dozens of injured were still being treated in hospital following Wednesday evening’s quakes and thousands were expected to spend a second night in tents and shelters. “Lorca looks like Beirut, with everything on the ground and huge cracks in the walls,” said mayor Franciscó Jodar. Structural engineers were putting red stickers on the fronts of buildings too dangerous to occupy, with at least some expected to be demolished. Jodar said 90% of homes in the town, which has 92,000 residents, were habitable but officials from the regional government of Murcia previously claimed 80% were damaged. Some buildings had collapsed completely. Two pregnant women and a child were among those who died in the quakes, which measured 4.4 and 5.2 on the Richter scale. Up to 20,000 people spent Wednesday night in squares, parks and nearby countryside fearing further tremors. “An earthquake of 5.2 magnitude is not intense enough to produce collapses, so the damage done is due to previous damage,” said Luis Suárez, president of the Geological Society of Spain. The earlier damage may have been caused by the 4.4 magnitude quake that came first. One witness, who gave his name as Cecilio, said he had come across a boy killed by falling masonry while walking the family dog. “The mother was calling out ‘help me, help me’, but there was nothing we could do,” he said. Another witness, Joaquín Román, spent the night in a park with his family. He told the Spanish newspaper El Pais: “It was awful. I was walking down the street when suddenly masonry started falling off the buildings and people fell on to the ground like puppets.” Rescue teams, military personnel and bulldozers moved into the town on Thursday morning to clear away rubble, which included one three-storey building that had collapsed across a street. Experts said the town had been unlucky to be hit because the quake’s epicentre was close by and just two miles underground, rather than at the usual depth of between six and 12 miles. “It’s only really caused such damage because it was so shallow and the – epicentre was so close to the town of Lorca,” said Roger Musson of the British Geological Survey. This was the deadliest earthquake in Spain since 1956, when 12 people died and 70 were injured in the southern region of Granada. The country’s last fatal earthquake was in 1969. Spain Europe Natural disasters and extreme weather Giles Tremlett guardian.co.uk

Posted by on May 12, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.