Earthquakes don’t end when the shaking stops

It’s been nearly two weeks since the great earthquakes near the Turkey-Syria border. It’s still front-page news featuring jarring photos of buildings reduced to rubble and interviews with those that barely survived. Each day the death toll continues to climb and currently stands at over 45,000 and at least 122,000 injuries. I am sure those numbers will rise.

For the survivors, the earthquake has only just begun. The actual shaking lasted less than a minute. Forty seconds of strong motion seems like an eternity, but it is a mere instant in the full scope of earthquake disasters. Many are displaced from homes in the dead of winter. Even people who still have homes have lost their livelihoods and are dependent upon relief efforts. What happens next is largely a function of the efforts put in place in the years and decades before the rupture started.

I always began my natural disaster class at Humboldt with a graphic depicting the disaster cycle — a circle with the event (flood, hurricane, earthquake etc.) at the top. Moving clockwise is response, assessing what happened and fighting fires, rescuing people, securing damaged areas and so forth. The response phase merges into relief efforts (medical care, food/water, shelter, and other basic needs).

Response and relief occur in the hours and weeks immediately following a disaster and get the most media attention, but it’s the next part of the circle that determines the survivability of a community and how it will fare in the next disaster. Recovery rarely provides photo-ops that make headline news but it’s the phase that restores communities to functioning, self-sustaining societies. It starts with clearing debris and restoring infrastructure and continues with rebuilding structures and the economy. For major disasters, the recovery phase is costly and