Good morning. It’s Friday, Sept. 15. Here’s what you need to know to start your day.
- Moroccan earthquake highlights California’s vulnerability
- Striking workers may soon be able to collect unemployment benefits
- The best fast-food soft serve ice cream
- And here’s today’s e-newspaper
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An earthquake warning 6,000 miles away
A magnitude 6.8 earthquake rocked Marrakech, Morocco, a week ago. More than 2,900 people have died (rescuers are finding more remains every day), and more than 5,500 are injured. Countless more are missing.
Most of the buildings destroyed in the earthquake were made of brick or unreinforced masonry adobe. Buildings in Morocco are designed to keep cool in extreme heat, but the building materials are vulnerable in an earthquake. And that underscores a harsh reality: Crumbling buildings are what make earthquakes deadly.
Morocco’s destruction is “very similar to what can happen with brick buildings in California,” Craig Chamberlain, president of the Structural Engineers Assn. of Southern California, told my colleagues Rong-Gong “Ron” Lin II and Summer Lin.
California’s older buildings could crumble if a similar earthquake struck
After the 1971 San Fernando earthquake killed 64 people and damaged hundreds of buildings, codes changed for buildings to require more steel and wood (which can bend and give as the earth moves underneath) along with other earthquake-safe building approaches. But so many buildings are grandfathered in to older codes.
More than 1,000 concrete buildings are still spread throughout Los Angeles.
[Read more: How concrete buildings fail in an earthquake]
L.A. County owns 33 of those buildings, including its administration building,…
Read the full article here
