Buildings acting as "Weapons of Mass Destruction" - Chile and Haiti

And it's -- a well-known phrase is that earthquakes don't kill people, buildings do. And we are now seeing that buildings are in fact weapons of mass destruction. And in fact, it's, to me, completely unacceptable that we should live in a world where you can shake the ground a little bit, and the building will fall down. It's just nonsense. We know how to do it right. It's just that we haven't done it right...

Then the quality of the concrete matters. If you mix three parts of sand to one part of cement, which is something they'll never tell you in school, but which most construction people know, you get good quality cement that doesn't fall to pieces in an earthquake. However, if you go down the beach and shovel beach sand into a wheelbarrow and take it back to your building site without washing it or without checking, you know, exactly what it's got in it -- it might have dirt or soil, or it might have salt in -- you finish up with a very weak concrete. And it's all too tempting, if you're building your own house, as must have occurred frequently in Haiti, to take four parts of sand or five parts of sand, making an extremely weak concrete.

Another thing is the addition of aggregate. When you build strong buildings, as an earthquake engineer would certainly be doing in Chile, and have done, you use a very angular kind of aggregate. If you use rounded pebbles, the pebbles don't grab on the cement, and they just fall to pieces...

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