This story was reported for the San Diego News Network on April 5, 2010.
Experts agree the strongest earthquake in decades struck Southern California Sunday.
With the severe magnitude of the 7.2 temblor, many are left wondering why there isn’t more damage in San Diego. Experts say it’s because the county was well-prepared.
“There are three components that have created a resilient community,” said Ron Lane, San Diego County’s director of emergency services. “A well-trained first responders system, a prepared citizenry and building codes that are made with earthquakes in mind. This was a good wake-up call for San Diego and I encourage San Diegans to think about what happened yesterday.”
San Diego State University geology professor and seismologist Kim Bak Olsen noted that geography played a major role in the relatively minor damage done in San Diego.
“If the 7.2.-magnitude earthquake happened right on the fault in the San Diego area, we would have seen a lot of damage, no doubt about it,” Olsen said. “It’s really a question of how far away buildings are from the fault.”
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UC San Diego professor of structural engineering Benson Shing cited modern construction standards as well.
“It was the quality of construction in San Diego and really, it was luck,” he said.
Shing said that the Easter earthquake isn’t necessarily a wake-up call, but a reminder that buildings in the region built before the 1930s need to be properly retrofitted.
But Lane acknowledged that the buildings that need to retrofitted in San Diego are few and far between.
“We have over 800,000 buildings in San Diego County and all but 1,200 are built to those standards and certainly that made a big difference,” he said. “I think we saw in Haiti what would have happened if we didn’t have building codes — it’s a stark contrast.”
It was a different story south of the border, where Mexico has a mix of modern and outdated construction.
So far, the quake has claimed two lives in Mexico, one of which occurred when a house collapsed. At least 100 people were injured.
The twin border towns of Calexico, Calif., and Mexicali, Mexico, suffered damage to buildings and dealt with disruption to utilities.
Modern construction standards likely prevented widespread destruction in fast-growing Mexicali, which underwent a boom of new housing in the past two decades, said Jose Restrepo, Shing’s colleague at UCSD.
By contrast, there was no building code in Haiti, where the death toll exceeded 200,000 and more than 250,000 buildings were destroyed.
Though another earthquake didn’t immediately occur as some experts expected, Olsen said Southern Californians may have to prepare for another earthquake in the next decade.
“There is a 30 to 40 percent chance a 7.5-magnitude or larger earthquake will happen,” he said. “We know it’s going to happen, we just don’t know exactly when. Yesterday’s earthquake increased the chance of it happening.”
Associated Press writer Alicia Chang contributed to this report. Hoa Quach is the political editor for the San Diego News Network.