| | | | | | | | | | | |

Earthquakes can cause severe and widespread damage to weak buildings or structures, or to those located on ground subject to fault breakage, strong shaking, or landsliding. The slip (movement) on the fault may break the surface of the Earth, offsetting roads and tearing apart buildings or pipelines built across the fault. Such damage can be spectacular, but it is limited to the vicinity of the fault.

Most damage results from strong shaking during the passage of seismic waves, which spread out from the fault over a large region. Shaking may be severe enough and long enough to collapse weak buildings, overturn furniture, topple water heaters and storage tanks, and collapse unsafe dams. These effects can result in further damage through fires resulting from broken gas mains and fallen electric wires, the loss of water to fight fires because of broken water mains, oil spills caused by failure of storage tanks, and flooding resulting from dam failure. Shaking can also cause landslides. These in turn can damage buildings, roads, and pipelines built on slide areas or downhill from them. An underwater slide off the delta deposited by a river can cause a seismic sea wave, or tsunami. Such waves can be as large as 30 m (100 feet) high. If they occur when the tide is high, they can sweep inland into a town and destroy harbor facilities and buildings. In some of the largest earthquakes, such waves have stranded fishing boats in the middle of towns a few blocks from the harbor. The animation sequences in the diskette version of this report illustrate each of the above-mentioned effects of earthquakes.

Contact Information

eletronic mail:

28238@angelfire.com

back to top

Formation Results of Earthquakes Examples Equipments precautions Prediction quiz links

Sign Guestbook View Guestbook

last updated: 17/08/99。