Professor David Alexander of Cranfield University at Britain's Royal Military College of Science says that, in spite of centuries of experience in dealing with earthquakes, the same mistakes are repeated. The use of poor quality concrete and inappropriate construction leads to unnecessary deaths, while untrained rescuers put themselves at risk and foreign response is almost always too slow. He says disaster mitigation could be improved by dispelling the myths about panic, looting and disease.

Of 10,000 earthquakes registered by seismologists each year, an average of 17 cause casualties. Most of these kill and injure only small numbers of people and, in an average year, only one or two earthquakes cause more than 500 deaths.

Though the totals are very variable from year to year, the long-term average of seismic mortality has remained fairly constant at about 9,500, with nearly five times as many recorded as injured.

Given the level of increase in the population of highly seismic countries, such as Indonesia, Iran and China, the lack of a strong upward trend in mortality and morbidity represents some degree of success in reducing the risks.

As much as anything, it is probably related to the spread of reinforced concrete construction. On average, large and multiple-occupancy buildings tend to be safer in concrete than in masonry, even when not built to the standard of anti-seismic building codes.

On average, between five and a dozen buildings collapse per person killed, a fact that testifies to the value of people's self-protective behaviour. However, although earthquakes do not occur preferentially at night, death tolls tend to be disproportionately high in nocturnal events, as sleep deprives people of the ability to react quickly enough when tremors occur.

These facts seem oddly reassuring, for they give the impression that seismic mortality is under control, the risk of death in a major earthquake is limited and mitigation is beginning to take effect.

While this is fairly much the case, there is another, more disquieting side to the story, as shown by recent earthquakes in south-central Italy (San Giuliano Pugliese, October 2002), eastern Turkey (Bingol, May 2003) and northern Algeria (Boumerdes, May 2003).

In fact, in some lamentable ways, the impact of each new earthquake is monotonously like that of the previous ones. This is true each time for both the facts of the event and how it is perceived.

UNFORTUNATE FACTS

Despite all that is known about earthquake hazards and disasters, the uncomfortable fact is that the same defects and mistakes are revealed again and again each time new tremors occur.

By virtue of their lightness, flexibility and integral frame structure, wooden buildings are particularly safe in earthquakes, but they can only be of limited size and are vulnerable to other hazards, principally fire and windstorm.

In areas where wood is not the predominant building material, reinforced concrete is the best insurance against structural collapse in earthquakes -- above all if it is used according to anti-seismic specifications.

Yet each time a major earthquake occurs in a well-known seismic area we observe the consequences of the use of poor quality concrete and inappropriate construction.

We find weak columns, structural elements that are badly tied into one another, wrongly placed and badly tied reinforcing bars, infill walls that are not tied into structure, failure to provide structural bracing, and a host of other defects.

So similar are the failure modes that it is possible to assemble a photograph gallery of almost identical examples from dozens of different countries and three or four continents.

The Algerian earthquake of May 2003 produced scenes of structural collapse that were remarkably reminiscent of those photographed during the El Asnam earthquake of October 1980.

In October 2002 the shoddy construction of a school at San Giuliano, Italy, killed 26 pupils and replicated the conditions of structural collapses that occurred in nearby towns in the earthquake of November 1980.

The same shoddy construction -- poorly mixed concrete, weak joins between column and beam, lack of diagonal bracing or shear walls, heavy but weak superstructures -- led to the collapse of a school and the deaths of 83 children at Bingol in Turkey.

The scene reminded one strongly of patterns of collapse in the Marmara earthquake of August 1999. Is it possible that we have learned nothing in all these years of seismic engineering research?

In Algeria, much of the rescue work was carried out by untrained people in T-shirts and baseball caps.

It reminds one of the 1985 earthquake in Mexico city, when an average of 2.2 of the same sort of rescuers died for every victim brought out alive from under the rubble. In Algeria several survivors were crushed to death while entering damaged buildings during aftershocks: unfortunately, this is par for the course.

Moreover, it is not uncommon for the fatal risk of crush syndrome to be ignored. It occurs when ruptured tissue poisons the blood and blocks the kidneys, such that victims brought out alive and conscious from the rubble die in hospital of kidney failure. It is a well-known problem, but by no means a solved one.

The participation of foreign rescue teams in such disasters is laudable but of limited value. Research shows that survival rates for trapped victims fall off dramatically long before the foreign teams can arrive on the scene.

Indeed, on average about 90 per cent of assistance immediately after a sudden-impact disaster is likely to be generated locally, so very much depends on the quality and quantity of local resources and organisation. Time and time again the first response efforts are chaotic and amateurish.

Seismic risk is concentrated in schools, hospitals and multiple-occupancy apartment blocks. In the January 2001 El Salvador earthquake, four hospitals collapsed. In the 1996 Sakhalin earthquake in Russia's far east, the vast majority of the 1,983 victims were killed in a single compound of 17 apartment blocks that collapsed totally. And then there were the schools in Italy and Turkey.

Neither for structural mitigation nor emergency relief is there much need of new learning. What is urgently required is a post-mortem for existing knowledge. Why is it not being applied?

MYTHS AND MISCONCEPTIONS

Another aspect of the problem is the persistence of particular myths and misconceptions about earthquake disasters. For instance, panic is not inevitable during the event. When it does occur it tends to be circumscribed and a transient phenomenon, often masking rational, self-protective behaviour.

Once again the Algerian earthquake has led the mass media to report that "epidemics are feared". In fact, it is precisely because they are feared that they are unlikely to occur, except, perhaps, for very controllable outbreaks of gastroenteritis when people consume unclean food or water.

Often, the media fail to appreciate the normal incidence of diseases in the disaster area. This can lead to the rather artificial "discovery" of cases of (endemic) cholera, or other diseases.

Usually, health care improves in the short-term aftermath of a disaster, given the extra attention paid to it by governments and humanitarian organisations.

The presence of unburied dead bodies does not threaten the health of survivors and rescuers, yet still the myth is still dearly held and frequently recounted.

Looting is another favourite construct of the media. It is not unknown after natural disasters but tends to be held well in check by the so-called "therapeutic community", the strengthened public consensus on what is good and what is bad.

If it occurs, looting is not symptomatic of the breakdown of social controls in the aftermath of disaster, but it reflects a society in which lawlessness is endemic--i.e. any disturbance could lead to such larceny.

Lastly, the mass media, addicted to "tidal waves" when describing non-tidal tsunamis, loves the Richter scale. While no one would want to undervalue the work of the great Californian geophysicist Charles F. Richter, modern seismologists tend not to use the Richter, or local magnitude, scale, as it is inaccurate at high magnitudes. They use body wave magnitude, moment magnitude and such scales, but in any case, magnitude, a very approximate surrogate for seismic energy release, is no guide to the effects of an earthquake.

DIAGNOSIS AND CURE

The lack of attention to what is already known about earthquakes implies that the biggest challenges are first the dissemination of existing knowledge, not the production of new research, and secondly getting such information acted upon in terms of improved mitigation and preparedness.

The eminent disaster researcher Ben Wisner has argued that something akin to, and with the authority of, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change is needed.

Governments, he says, must be coerced into fulfilling their obligations to protect citizens against earthquakes.

Citizens also need to be convinced that earthquakes are worth taking seriously during the long intervals between one lethal seismic event and the next.

Finally, the mass media must be invited more firmly to stop propagating stereotypes and myths each time a disaster occurs.

These are very serious challenges for the community of academics and practitioners concerned to mitigate earthquake catastrophes.