How does earthquake affect people

Governments have to take care of the damage caused by this great disaster. As we all know that earthquakes cause infrastructures to collapse, shops, reservoirs dams, and hospitals are destroyed during the incident. Governments have to spend a huge amount of money to rebuild the places destroyed. Moreover, this natural disaster causes the spending of the funds to distribute medicine and food to victims. And, Stock Markets are disrupted causing the market crash or recession.

Furthermore, those who have investments in that particular area may decide to leave. And if this happens, it will result in unemployment and cause loss of job opportunities.

An Earthquake also affects the human environment. Damage to the environment during an earthquake causes the destruction of properties and loss of lives more than the actual earthquake. This is a very deadly disease called coccidioidomycosis or Valley Fever. Broken water pipes caused by this natural disaster can rupture gas, flood lands, break fuel, and electrical lines which can lead to a fire.

Also, the hazardous material spilled introduces radioactive, medical, sewage, and poisonous material into the water, air, and earth. Aftershocks of this natural hazard can cause new tsunamis to form and hit the land before communities have time to recover from the original damage.

And when a lot of tsunamis hit the seaside area, it can cause great erosion, thereby demolishing buildings in its way. Due to this hazard, electricity, sanitation systems, and water of any place is destroyed and the extent of the damage makes the early renovation of these amenities very hard because rescuing people trapped in the rubble is the main concern of the government and rescue teams.

Therefore the affected people face the difficulty of sanitation, hygiene, and power. Potable and clean drinking water becomes a problem. Earthquakes do not only leave permanent marks in the environment but also affect human lives.

In conclusion, the world has experienced numerous earthquakes in years. Chile, Haiti, Japan, New Zealand, etc are places where earthquakes have occurred. And they all resulted in high destruction on people and peoples life physically, economically, environmentally, and socially.

Humans in such affected places are in the greatest shock of lives and they require outside support. Therefore, help in the form of temporary shelter, food, safe drinking water, and different types of medicines are necessary. Also, the community needs to look after the survivors that have no one to care for them. On a long-term basis, helping the affected community and rehabilitation becomes difficult as the incident leaves a permanent imprint on victims.

Their social growth, acceptance, and education become a problem that has to be handled by the whole country. In addition, the earthquake does not only affect those who are direct victims, but it also affects the whole world and several of them come to help; assist in search operations and help in other jobs.

Taking into account the effect of earthquakes on humans both immediate and later , one can understand the huge task involved in taking care of humans after this disaster. Many national and international agencies also assist during this period but their contribution is not up to the required level. Being a nature lover, I feel it is my responsibility to show the real environmental problems that we are facing in this world to the public.

I talk about Environmental problems, Nature and Life. Your email address will not be published. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. As a generalization, the severity of ground shaking increases as magnitude increases and decreases as distance from the causative fault increases.

Although the physics of seismic waves is complex, ground shaking can be explained in terms of body waves, compressional, or P , and shear, or S , and surface waves, Rayleigh and Love. P waves propagate through the Earth with a speed of about 15, miles per hour and are the first waves to cause vibration of a building.

S waves arrive next and cause a structure to vibrate from side to side. They are the most damaging waves, because buildings are more easily damaged from horizontal motion than from vertical motion.

The P and S waves mainly cause high-frequency vibrations; whereas, Rayleigh waves and Love waves , which arrive last, mainly cause low-frequency vibrations. Body and surface waves cause the ground, and consequently a building, to vibrate in a complex manner.

The objective of earthquake resistant design is to construct a building so that it can withstand the ground shaking caused by body and surface waves. In land-use zoning and earthquake resistant design, knowledge of the amplitude, frequency composition, and the time duration of ground shaking is needed. These quantities can be determined from empirical observed data correlating them with the magnitude and the distribution of Modified Mercalli intensity of the earthquake, distance of the building from the causative fault, and the physical properties of the soil and rock underlying the building.

The subjective numerical value of the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale indicates the effects of ground shaking on man, buildings, and the surface of the Earth. When a fault ruptures , seismic waves are propagated in all directions, causing the ground to vibrate at frequencies ranging from about 0. Buildings vibrate as a consequence of the ground shaking; damage takes place if the building cannot withstand these vibrations. Compressional waves and shear waves mainly cause high-frequency greater than 1 Hertz vibrations which are more efficient than low-frequency waves in causing low buildings to vibrate.

Rayleigh and Love waves mainly cause low-frequency vibrations which are more efficient than high-frequency waves in causing tall buildings to vibrate. Because amplitudes of low-frequency vibrations decay less rapidly than high-frequency vibrations as distance from the fault increases, tall buildings located at relatively great distances 60 miles from a fault are sometimes damaged. Taken from: Hays, W. Geological Survey Professional Paper B, p.

Surface faulting is the differential movement of the two sides of a fracture at the Earth's surface and can be strike-slip , normal , and reverse or thrust. Combinations of the strike-slip type and the other two types of faulting can be found. Although displacements of these kinds can result from landslides and other shallow processes, surface faulting, as the term is used here, applies to differential movements caused by deep-seated forces in the Earth, the slow movement of sedimentary deposits toward the Gulf of Mexico, and faulting associated with salt domes.

Death and injuries from surface faulting are very unlikely, but casualties can occur indirectly through fault damage to structures. Surface faulting, in the case of a strike-slip fault, generally affects a long narrow zone whose total area is small compared with the total area affected by ground shaking. Nevertheless, the damage to structures located in the fault zone can be very high, especially where the land use is intensive.

A variety of structures have been damaged by surface faulting, including houses, apartments, commercial buildings, nursing homes, railroads, highways, tunnels, bridges, canals, storm drains, water wells, and water, gas, and sewer lines.

Damage to these types of structures has ranged from minor to very severe. An example of severe damage occurred in when three railroad tunnels were so badly damaged by faulting that traffic on a major rail linking northern and southern California was stopped for 25 days despite an around-the-clock repair schedule.

The displacements, lengths, and widths of surface fault ruptures show a wide range. Fault displacements in the United States have ranged from a fraction of an inch to more than 20 feet of differential movement. As expected, the severity of potential damage increases as the size of the displacement increases. The lengths of the surface fault ruptures on land have ranged from less than 1 mile to more than miles. Most fault displacement is confined to a narrow zone ranging from 6 to 1, feet in width, but separate subsidiary fault ruptures may occur 2 to 3 miles from the main fault.

The area subject to disruption by surface faulting varies with the length and width of the rupture zone. Liquefaction is not a type of ground failure; it is a physical process that takes place during some earthquakes that may lead to ground failure.

As a consequence of liquefaction, clay-free soil deposits, primarily sands and silts, temporarily lose strength and behave as viscous fluids rather than as solids. Liquefaction takes place when seismic shear waves pass through a saturated granular soil layer, distort its granular structure, and cause some of the void spaces to collapse.

Disruptions to the soil generated by these collapses cause transfer of the ground-shaking load from grain-to-grain contacts in the soil layer to the pore water. This transfer of load increases pressure in the pore water, either causing drainage to occur or, if drainage is restricted, a sudden buildup of pore-water pressure.

These damaged roads and bridges will also make it difficult for local emergency responders to report for duty. During a widespread disaster such as a major earthquake, you will need to band together with your neighbors to do the most good for the most people, all the while keeping your personal safety in mind.

Most of this is due to lack of planning, but some disasters are just too great to overcome. Skip to Main Content. Loading Close. Do Not Show Again Close. Sign In. Cascading Events When a large earthquake occurs, usually it is after the shaking stops that the major problems occur.