"Concrete Risks"

October 13, 2013
Rong-Gong Lin II
La Times

We are overdue for a very large earthquake and LA could be considered as an old city that is at risk with its old buildings. Most of Los Angeles's buildings are built with mostly concrete and no anti-earthquake precautions. More than 1,000 old concrete buildings are predicted to collapse during a large earthquake. An estimate of about 50 buildings will be completely destroyed causing serious injuries or death to civilians inside and around them. The reason for the predictions for many of these old structures to collapse is because they do not have enough steel reinforcements which create a large amount of support during the sideways motions of an earthquake. Our city has known about these vulnerable buildings for about 40 years but has failed to force owners to make corrections to the structures. Seismologists have reported that buildings that are next to the vulnerable concrete buildings will have to make even more reinforcements because of the chain reaction that collapsing buildings create, once one building collapses it is very likely for the building or buildings adjacent to it to collapse as well. The reinforcements will cost a very large amount of money but lives of innocent civilians are priceless.