The Really Big One (2015)

It's a common complaint on HN that too many articles include irrelevant details about the people and scenery of technical fields, but this article really pulls it off perfectly. It is dense in technical information and the personal stories complement this information and make it more memorable (e.g. I didn't know that the duration of an earthquake is a rough proxy for its magnitude, but I won't forget after reading the narration in the opening paragraphs).

Yeah. The Americas have been populated for maybe 20-40 thousand years. And heavily, according so some sources.

I was. I was far enough away from the epicenter that it felt like a pigeon fart. I knew the magnitude was greater further south, but I didn't think it warranted further consideration. It's only after feeling a 7.0+ one that I developed this healthy(?) sense of preparedness.

Here's a mobile-readable copy of that comment...

An omnious quote from an article on l0phet:

> Wysopal offered this grim precedent: Cities were once vulnerable to disastrous fires, which raged through dense clusters of mostly wooden buildings. It took a giant fire in Chicago to spur government officials into serious reforms, including limits on new wooden structures, a more robust water supply for suppressing blazes and an overhaul to the city’s fire department.

> “The market didn’t solve the problem of cities burning down,” Wysopal said, predicting that Internet security may require a historic disaster to force change. “It seems to me that the market isn’t really going to solve this one on its own.”

> But here’s a frightening fact: The push to create tough new fire-safety standards did not start after the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, which killed hundreds of people and left 100,000 homeless. It took a second fire, nearly three years later in 1874, to get officials in Chicago to finally make real changes.

[via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9760164]

Progress in fire safety was even more gradual than this comment makes it sound. About 30 years later, the Iroquois Theatre Fire (also in Chicago) killed twice as many people as the "Great" fire. That spurred them to realize that, among other innovations, exits should have an "EXIT" sign over them, and people should be able to push on exit doors to open them.

There's always another accident, with new lessons. Some are bigger and some are smaller but there's never quite a single event that fixes an entire industry.