Issue of
February 10, 1999

Geophysics students to observe Colombian earthquake devastation firsthand

BY LISA TREI

Geophysics students will join staff from GeoHazards International when they travel to Colombia in a few weeks to observe the effects of the earthquake that devastated parts of that country on Jan. 25.

"We can write all the equations in the world on the blackboard but seeing the actual damage is invaluable," said civil engineering Professor Anne Kiremidjian, who plans to send two graduate students after arrangements are made with Colombian authorities.

The group responsible for the planned trip is GeoHazards, a nonprofit organization based in Palo Alto that assists the world's poorest nations mitigating earthquake risk. The 6-year-old organization has close ties to Stanford, with engineering professor emeritus Haresh Shah and business school professor James Van Horne on its board of trustees. The president is Brian Tucker, a seismologist and a consulting professor in civil engineering and geophysics. For more information about GeoHazards International, go to www.geohaz.org.

Project manager Cynthia Cardona, a 1998 graduate in structural engineering, was in Colombia when the 6.0 Richter scale quake rocked the country, killing hundreds of people and making thousands more homeless. She will return to Colombia with the graduate students to offer assistance through GeoHazards, the only nonprofit organization of its kind that promotes earthquake safety and risk management in developing countries such as Nepal and Ecuador.

"We might be able to help with reconstruction and future mitigation efforts," she said about Colombia.

Kiremidjian said that a 6.0 earthquake shouldn't have caused so much damage. To highlight how similar earthquakes can affect two areas differently, Tucker has compared the 1988 earthquake in the former Soviet republic of Armenia and the 1989 Loma Prieta temblor. They "were nearly equivalent in their magnitudes and the number of people in the affected regions," he said. But 25,000 people died in Armenia, compared to 63 people in California.

The importance of earthquake preparedness was underlined in a presentation on Feb. 3 in Mitchell of Cardona's firsthand experience in Colombia. At the time of the quake she was in Manizales, the capital of the coffee-producing region, coordinating support for new educational projects to be sponsored by Peet's Coffee+Tea. After the quake, Cardona headed to the capital of Bogotá and met Omar Dario Cardona (no relation), president of the Colombian Association of Earthquake Engineering. She accompanied him on a trip to the worst-affected regions just 48 hours after the disaster.

Cardona's presentation compared how the earthquake affected two cities, Pereira and Armenia, and how authorities in each location responded. Cardona said that Pereira, population 695,000 and 60 kilometers from the epicenter, fared better than Armenia, population 290,000 and 20 kilometers from the epicenter. Apart from the difference in distance, Pereira appeared to be better prepared because four earthquakes had struck the city since 1938. In response, the city had developed seismic hazard assessment and emergency response plans and promoted community awareness. In contrast, no earthquakes had been recorded in Armenia during the last century and the city had a poorly developed emergency response system. "Apparently, the seismic code [in Pereira] and its enforcement really spoke for itself," Cardona said. SR