It isn’t every Winter that two incredibly powerful earthquakes shatter major cities in the Western hemisphere, and my bet is that this makes people take special notice to just how much they take for granted in the world we live. I’m not talking about any grand spiritual notions of fleeting time on earth or the temporal notion of reality.

I’m talking about buildings that don’t fall down when they aren’t supposed to.

Living on the West coast and growing up in the Midwest, natural disasters have held a sort of omnipresent though not dominating place in my consciousness. When a tornado struck in Missouri or Iowa or Illinois, it was always the shoddy, hap-hazardly constructed trailer parks that were shown leveled on the evening news. Rarely were densely populated areas decimated nor were the affluent suburbs reduced to the tattered remains of a landfill. In my apartment now, with its sinking corners, cracked windows, and wobbly floorboards, I know where exactly to take refuge when and if a earthquake hits (in the level, sturdy 6 ft long hallway that connects the bathroom, bedrooms and kitchen).

But I’m also not terribly worried about the house or apartment complex next door collapsing into mine. I’m also not worried about the building that I go to school in falling in on me in such a scenario. But maybe I should be.

In recently publicized and proactive campaign by West-coast states, public buildings and public schools are being allocated the funds they need to complete much-needed, overdue seismic retrofits. From a recent AP story by Alicia Chang:

Oregon has 1,300 schools and public safety buildings that are at high risk of collapse during a major quake. The state recently doled out $15 million to two dozen schools and emergency facilities to start the retrofit process. State law requires that all poorly built public safety building be upgraded by 2022 and public schools by 2032…

…Chile and the Pacific Northwest are part of several seismic hotspots around the globe where plates of the Earth’s crust grind and dive. These so called subduction zones give rise to mountain ranges, ocean trenches and volcanic arcs, but also spawn the largest quakes. The magnitude 8.8 Chile quake occurred in an offshore region that was under increased stress caused by a 1960 magnitude 9.5 quake – the largest recorded in history, according to geologist Jian Lin of the Woods Hols Oceanographic Institution. The temblor destroyed or badly damaged 500,000 homes and killed more than 700 people.

Similar tectonic forces are at play off the Pacific Northwest, where the Juan de Fuca plate is diving beneath North America. At some point, centuries of pent-up stress in the Cascadia subduction zone will cause the plates to slip. Scientists cannot predict when a quake will occur, only that one will…

…The Pacific Northwest “has a long geological history of doing exactly what happened in Chile,” said Brian Atwater, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and University of Washington. “It’s not a matter of if but when the next one will happen.”

As an student of architecture, I know for damn sure that new buildings (particularly public ones) employ a whole host of incredibly innovative solutions to withstanding seismic loads. But they do this because the law dictates they must. Such restrictions on the freedoms of builders to cut corners are entirely necessary and forever the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile will stand as evidence of that necessity. It will be only a matter of time until every facet of our built environment will necessarily live up to that standard (including our travel infrastructure and the rest of our built environment that the state does not own). But this will not happen unless it is the government (state and federal) who are directly enforcing and support such policies. Haiti has no building codes. The central government exerted zero concern for the well-being of their citizens within their own homes, and such disaffection from the concern for their citizen’s well-being is the primary reason why a natural disaster displaced millions of people from a densely populated urban area in the year 2010. Chile, while being hit by an even more powerful earthquake, bore lesser consequences on the human scale because of the minimum standards adopted by their government; such a tragic contrast must be learned from and cannot be ignored in considering the path forward toward rebuilding and redeveloping.

I’m very heartened that the state of Oregon, even with its budget shortfalls and revenue losses, can place priorities on necessary actions to be taken by the state. This is particularly so, when that action is the ensuring that our cities, schools and workplace will not fall out from beneath our feet one day.