Day 28: Huge earthquake hit China

Yesterday af­ter­noon a mag­ni­tude 7.8 earth­quake hit Sichuan Province. That’s way out in the mid­dle of China, but even peo­ple in Beijing and Shanghai and neigh­bor­ing coun­tries felt it. (I didn’t. Probably de­pends on the foun­da­tion.) For com­par­i­son with the SF Bay Area, the 1906 San Francisco earth­quake was also a 7.8. The 1989 Loma Prieta earth­quake was 6.9.

I’ve been to Yunnan Province, just south of Sichuan, and if I re­mem­ber right the build­ings were mostly made of con­crete – not some­thing that would be able to with­stand a ma­jor earth­quake. (Californians think about this stuff.) I imag­ine Sichuan build­ings are prob­a­bly the same, and to­day the death toll es­ti­mate has passed 10,000. I had a feel­ing it’d be bad when I first heard about it, but wasn’t ex­pect­ing such a big number.

Go to Shanghaiist.com for more info. They’re do­ing an ex­cel­lent job keep­ing up­dated with the news.

(Photo: Xinhua, Wang Jianhua)

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