Collapsed buildings have a rather medieval air. Standing between a row of collapsed apartment blocks in a street of the Turkish city of Yalova, not too far from the stadium where terrified people had taken shelter, I felt as though I was in an earthquake museum. The rubble, the aura of decay and, most of all, the trembling and distressed faces, played havoc with my emotions. This is what it must be like, I imagined, when civilised humanity was largely at the mercy of nature. But this is now.
I visited Yalova, Halidare, Golcuk, Izmit and Adapazari, the cities most affected by the Turkish earthquake. The devastation I saw in these cities cannot be appreciated simply by looking at television pictures. Nothing was left standing in Yalova. In Halidare everything was levelled; some buildings had even slipped into the sea. Golcuk was a ghost town. Everywhere, orphaned children were playing in the debris. People wept constantly.
In Istanbul, I discovered myself what it was like to experience an earthquake. At 11.11am, on Tuesday 31 August, I felt a strong tremor. It was only 4.6 on the Richter scale, but it produced an uncontrollable fear. Twenty minutes later, there was another aftershock and, for the first time in my life, I tasted a primeval panic.
In all its horror, the Turkish earthquake reminds us how vulnerable we all really are. It reminds us also of science's unfinished business in the project of managing nature's traditional excesses. Yet the science of seismology is a highly mature field. Since the acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics, which tells us that the surface of the earth is made of lithospheric plates, we have developed a good understanding of what is going on down there, why earthquake zones occur where they do. With satellite data and computer simulations we get an increasingly accurate picture of local situations. But scientists are still a long way from being able to predict exactly when an earthquake will occur.
What seismology can and does do is to change the nature of uncertainty we face when confronted with earthquakes. Suppose you are living in an earthquake zone and are unaware of the dangers lurking in the future. This is what I call an "open uncertainty". But by telling you that you are living in an earthquake zone, and that a future earthquake is likely, seismology closes the uncertainty, producing a reasonable probability.
It even can, as it did in the case of Turkish earthquake, do better than that. Geologists had charted a series of ten earlier earthquakes, each measuring more than 6.7 on the Richter scale, that occurred along the 1,500 kilometres of the north Anatolian fault. They noted that earthquakes were interacting, causing increased stress in the region where the next quake occurred. Following each earthquake, the probability that another one will occur along the fault within a decade increased three times. Indeed, they had declared Izmit to be a highly precarious city. Thus, from a closed uncertainty we move to a "contained uncertainty" where the risks are reasonably well defined.
So, what happens when we have pinned the uncertainties down? In this, the best of all possible worlds, some scientists would advise on how to make our built environment earthquake-proof, while others would advise on the imminence of an earthquake. And then it would be rather as with hurricanes in the United States: we know they are coming and, when the storm finally approaches, everyone puts up the shutters and drives out of the way, returning afterwards to tidy up and resume normal life.
But this does not quite work for earthquakes, as people cannot leave their homes for years, if not decades, and towns and cities cannot be left empty. Thus, the advice about damage prevention becomes crucial. This is where the Turkish authorities, who were well aware of the risks, betrayed the trust of their citizens.
Seismology is also a rather special science. It is not tucked away tidily in laboratories; rather, it is very close to untamed, raw nature. This is why, I think, it needs to broaden its horizons. For example, we need to take more seriously the claims of dissident scientists such as Rupert Sheldrake that animals can sense the approach of an earthquake and give more accurate warnings by their frightened behaviour. There is nothing "non-scientific" about this idea; nor does it postulate any great extrasensory powers on behalf of animals. When crystalline rocks are stressed, they emit electric discharges - this is known as the piezo-electric effect. It wouldn't surprise me if animals can sense these electric discharges; after all, they can sense ultra-high frequency sound and other signals to which we humans are deaf.
We also tend to be deaf to more traditional ways of predicting earthquakes. There is a classic example of this in recent history. In 1976, there was a devastating earthquake in the Chinese city of Tangshan. One morning the ground heaved up by a metre, subsided and killed three-quarters of a million people. Up to that time, the Maoist government had been promoting a sort of barefoot earthquake warning service, which had been successful in the earthquake at Haicheng a year earlier. But the Tangshan catastrophe was taken as proof of its irrelevance.
The truth came out some 20 years later. There had been a massive cover-up: the provincial authorities had indeed listened to the peasants, and had saved the population of Qinglong county by timely evacuation, but those in Tangshan did not. And after the catastrophe, they kept the story quiet. Now we refer to Qinglong as a case of good, standard earthquake science, neglecting Tangshan as a cautionary tale of pride and corruption.
Corruption seems to be the key to bad earthquake provisions. Every civilised place now has earthquake protection codes for buildings, and in nearly every case these codes are routinely violated. This is why earthquakes, like other natural disasters, afflict the poor so much more than the rich. It was very easy for me to discern that all the buildings from Yalova to Adapazari were built on a wetland, right on top of the fault line, and on land reclaimed from the sea through landfill. Not only did the buildings have no quake protection, they also seemed to be made of chalk. The concrete was mixed with sea sand, making it almost useless. Clearly this was a disaster waiting to happen.
But even when all the guidelines are followed, we shouldn't assume that we are well protected. In Athens buildings are reinforced against tremors. But the recent earthquake there, which measured 5.9, brought houses and factories "tumbling to the ground like houses of cards" at its epicentre. In spite of a highly developed earthquake culture, the people of Kobe in Japan could not escape death and destruction. Indeed, in some cases, the built environment itself can be hazardous. In Tokyo, for instance, the tall buildings on narrow streets would shower broken glass on anyone who fled from collapsing buildings; and there is a whole petrochemical complex on reclaimed land in Tokyo bay which in an earthquake is predicted to shake like a jelly. Officials claim that they have followed all the regulations and that the land has been scientifically verified as safe. But few seismologists are convinced.
So it is hardly surprisingly that earthquakes often lead to political quakes and uprising against venal regimes. Back in 1973, there was a quake in a place previously known mainly through a funny song - Managua, Nicaragua. When the debris was cleared, people realised that they were wrong all along in thinking that they had a corrupt government. The earthquake showed that they had no government at all, just a bunch of corrupt officials. Suddenly a dissident movement called the Sandinistas came to the fore, and the rest is history. In Izmit and Istanbul, I noticed a similar awareness in the air. There is a sudden desire on all sides to make the Turkish government a respectable one; even the Greeks are joining in. Perhaps I am not the only one to remember Nicaragua and its political earthquake.
