The noise before the storm

Following the earthquake in Turkey, here is an article about disasters with many casualties that may accompany a strong earthquake and how Israel should prepare for them

Dr. Ephraim Laor | Galileo

Many believe that certain countries in the United States, or countries such as Japan, can deal with the consequences of a strong earthquake or NATECH disasters, natural phenomena that cause technological disasters such as earthquakes or tsunamis that cause an uncontrolled release of hazardous materials into the environment. In practice, the dealings of these countries are not satisfactory at all.

Moreover, many countries in the world underestimated the preparedness actions to deal with a strong earthquake and suffered victims and damage beyond the inevitable. Time and again it turns out that prevention is better than response. The fact that strong earthquakes severely harm the population - death, injury and severe disruption in the residents' lifestyles, migration (temporary or permanent) to the extent of hundreds of thousands and even several million people in each event - shows a fundamental conceptual failure.

The "force majeure" claim is a pale explanation. A strong earthquake causes a sudden disaster with many casualties (APR) due to a lack of sufficient thought. Human actions may prevent an APR, although they cannot prevent the natural phenomenon itself.

I will point here to fundamental failures that delay prevention actions and preparations to reduce casualties. The failures are mostly due to the shallowness of the professional knowledge on dealing with extreme emergency situations, APR's. I will mainly focus on enriching knowledge for prevention.

A sudden disaster with many casualties: flexible thinking is needed
Anyone involved in dealing with a sudden disaster with many casualties should disconnect from ways of thinking and acting that were copied from the world of routine and the world of war, ways that are not relevant and even harmful in the circumstances of AFR. He must bring closer and embrace what he denied and repressed; And on the other hand to keep away the logical - according to his method, the routine and the ready.

Under the conditions of a country like Israel, the Afran will amount to thousands or hundreds of thousands. Since AFN is a fundamental situation different from what is typical of wartime circumstances, any attempt to deal with this situation as a "private case" of war is wrong and takes many victims of the inevitable.

A strong earthquake will occur in Israel while reading this article with a similar probability that the earthquake will occur in a decade. We know almost nothing about the upcoming strong earthquake, the only one that really interests the public and its leaders. Scientists do not know how to predict a strong earthquake, although there are buds for substantially reducing the range of uncertainty regarding the windows of place, time, and intensity of a strong earthquake.

Scientists do not know how to predict NATECH phenomena (nuclear, chemically hazardous materials, biological materials) or an outbreak of man-made, accidental or malicious damage generators. But it is necessary to realize that in an industrialized region, certainly like Israel, NATECH phenomena are an integral part of a strong earthquake. Afranim usually fit in on very short notice, too short to "get along"; A trap for the people and the government that sets Yahbo on "we will get along" and "it will be fine".

It is important to emphasize that reality shows that a strong earthquake is the trigger for a long chain of damage generators that accompany every strong earthquake and whose lethality sometimes exceeds the earthquake itself, including this:
A. Subsequent earthquakes (aftershocks), tsunamis, (industrial) fires, volcanic eruptions.
B. Accidents with dangerous materials (nuclear, chemical, biological).

It won't happen to us?
It turns out that when it comes to Afran, the public and its leaders tend to believe that "it will not happen to us" and "if it does, there is very little to be done". Both assertions are unfounded! I will demonstrate the argument using two cases: a cyclone in Myanmar (formerly Burma) and a national executive exercise "Earthquake 2006" and a fundamental document for the health system 2009.

Cyclone in Burma

At the beginning of May 2008, a deadly cyclone occurred in the territory of Myanmar. The storm passed through an area that is home to about 24 million inhabitants, about 4 million of them in the central city of Yangon, the former capital. The Myanmar government, like everyone connected to the Internet, knew dozens of hours in advance what was about to happen and warned the residents to take defensive measures.

However, in the face of a basic lack of trust between the residents and the (military) government, many ignored the warning and condemned themselves to death, injury and displacement, in one of the deadliest disasters in human history. Between three and four million people were killed within half a day, about 2,400,000 became displaced in the storm's path, most of them in the Ayeyarwaddy River Delta.

A cyclone, certainly of such strength, has never yet attacked Myanmar, according to the records of the times and to the best of the memory of older Myanmarese. The residents who received a warning did not believe that this was possible. Fishermen went out to sea: none of them returned.

Document: "Preparing the health care system for earthquakes", 2009

In the document: "Preparing the Health System for Earthquakes", of one of the largest medical centers in Israel, it is written on page 1 regarding the expected casualties following a strong earthquake: "The estimates are that in a strong earthquake there will be between 5,000 and 15,000 dead and about 15,000 to 45,000 injured."

In the same document on page 56 it is written: "In principle, two types of scenarios are possible: a limited earthquake, on the order of up to a few hundred casualties; And a widespread earthquake, on the order of many hundreds to thousands of casualties." A perusal of the body of the document shows that its authors aimed for a reduced scenario dozens of times what was written in the beginning of the document, which reflects binding guidelines of the national reference scenario for earthquakes.

And here, in an earthquake on May 27.5.2006, 6.9 on the island of Java, Indonesia, hundreds of schools collapsed. In the 8.10.2005 magnitude earthquake that occurred on October 83,000, 17,000 in the Kashmir region, Pakistan-India-Afghanistan, over XNUMX people were killed, of which over XNUMX were children!

In view of these facts, preparation scenarios must be calibrated according to actual reality, instead of according to the digestive capacity and mental comfort of those involved in the preparation, preparation and practice. Here we saw, for example, that the earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010 killed at least 38,000 students, according to UNESCO. Whereas in Israel they practice an earthquake "[…] that occurred during the big break when the children were outside the buildings".

Interim conclusion
From the above it follows that it is necessary to prepare, and urgently. It also follows that an attempt to justify courses of action based on the test of the probability of the occurrence of an APR is wrong. Courses of action must be chosen based on the estimate of the damage and not on the probability of its occurrence, and on the cost of the mistake and not on any other test. A one-time event, such as the aforementioned earthquakes or a chemical accident in Bhopal, India (1984), is enough to set the State of Israel back years.

In the last decades, events occurred that were beyond any forecast of the exaggerators, even the most severe; But the fact is that they happened. What do you need to know in order to prevent earthquake damage? What do you need to know to prepare? Do leaders, scientists, emergency responders know what they need to know? The number of victims of earthquakes is determined by a close combination of four components:

A. Site response (proximity to an active fault; amplification; slopes; liquefaction; tsunami).
B. The quality of construction in relation to a concrete site.
third. Concrete location of people inhabiting a building/facility during the earthquake and their behavior.
d. The conduct of the national and municipal authorities before, during and after the earthquake.

It is natural forces that cause natural phenomena such as earthquakes; Adam's actions and his omissions generate Afran. Residents of Israel are exposed to earthquakes from more well-known places, such as the Syrian-African fault, less suspected ones such as the Mount Carmel, as well as the northern Galilee, southern Lebanon and the "Cypriot arc".

These are known and some of them are studied to one degree or another. I am concerned about seismic centers that, even if we knew about them, we attributed negligible importance to them or did not reveal them yet. An example of this is the fracture that operated in the area of ​​Kfar Ben-Nun-Shaalavim on 24.11.2007/4.4/XNUMX. The intensity of the earthquake was low, XNUMXM. But a similar miracle is not guaranteed for decades, the lifespan of the new cities: Modi'in, Maccabim, Reut, the nearby Kiryat Sefer, or older cities such as Lod and Ramla. Dangerous earthquakes are those that ignore their potential, unusual tremors in intensity and location.

Construction and engineering: danger zone
"Site effect" is a concept that refers to underground data in a specific coordinate. Site response greatly affects the resistance of a building or engineering facility to seismic activity. The factors influencing ether reaction are proximity to an active fracture; amplification; slopes; liquefaction; Tsunami.

How many of the designers of the buildings in Israel, the facilities, the infrastructure plants, the containers that store dangerous materials have properly considered these factors? Most of the engineering structures in Israel were built without any consideration, or without proper consideration, of the influence of these factors. Even today, when their influence is better known, although not yet legally binding, they are not a built-in part of Israeli Standard 413 and its chapters. That is, even today a facility built according to the law embodies a well-known doubt regarding its resistance to a strong earthquake.

Most of the buildings in Israel - for residences, infrastructure, industry, commerce and recreation - were built for a typical lifespan of 50 years. This is how they plan even today. Hundreds of thousands of them are over 50 years old. There are contingency plans for replacing them with new ones; Little of this actually happens. About half of the school complexes in Israel are approaching the end of their service life. The same goes for about a million square meters of hospital floor space, about half of the hospitals in Israel. You can continue to use them as warehouses for materials and equipment, but not as a roof for Israeli students or for the hospitalized and with them the best medical staff of the State of Israel.

And what about the buildings built in the seventies, eighties and later? The idea expects them to be resistant to seismic activity. An examination of the higher education system at the Technion, universities and colleges will show that there are few engineers who are licensed and qualified to design engineering structures and who have studied seismic construction.

There are planners who do not know how to design buildings for seismic resistance, and their classmates, from the same educational institutions, who serve in the regulatory bodies and planning committees, do not know this either. The negligent relationship of silence lasted for years and put hundreds of thousands of buildings and facilities in Israel that have doubts about their resistance to a moderate earthquake, not to mention a strong one.

A lesson in behavior during an earthquake
Concrete location of people inhabiting a building at the time of the earthquake, and their behavior, will determine the number of casualties at that time. The number of victims (killed, injured or displaced) will be derived, among other things, from the occupancy of buildings or from the location of each of those staying in the Afran arena in the seconds that the earthquake occurs. Location will determine if the resident will be harmed: personal and close family behavior will determine if the resident will survive. In many cases the public is instructed to stay away from buildings, noting that the earthquake does not kill but "buildings kill". This is true more or less in two thirds of the cases.

There is a fundamental difference in the chances of survival of a skilled person caught in an earthquake and between a person without skill. A difference of life and death, acquired in a training that lasted about 24 hours. Its virtues are comparable to someone who has been trained to drive a car and holds a license according to the traffic regulations, compared to his colleague who is driving for the first time in his life in particularly busy and stormy traffic. Those who are skilled in behavior - there is a great chance that they will avoid an earthquake and become an Afaran.

For now, despite a government decision from February 2004 to train the population to improve survivability, and the consistent preaching of most government spokesmen on the vitality of the residents' performance when responding, the citizens of Israel are not skilled in all of these and are not trained in the necessary skills. By the way, contrary to the feeling of many, the IDF soldiers and their junior and senior commanders also suffer from this: the lifeguard is not qualified for his job!

The earthquake may cause many injured people to varying degrees. All the hospitalization institutions in Israel are capable of treating many hundreds of wounded at the same time, according to the current criteria and standards. Citizens expect a medical system as observed in the expeditions to the scenes of AFR in Haiti (January 2010) and in Japan (April 2011); The medical system expects miracles.

As residents of Israel, we have received some of the best levels of service in the modern world. For that we are proud and grateful at a time of calm. In the circumstances of Afran, this is another example of an unbridgeable gap between expectations and the disappointment that will become evident from the performance. This requires studying and assimilating appropriate skills in professional staff of all types: medical, managerial, administrative, economic. All these are not done alone by lip balm. So far I have pointed out only the tip of the gap: it exists in all the components of the infrastructure for the protection of the residents.

Natural phenomena and technological disasters
NATECH is a general term for natural phenomena that cause technological disasters, such as earthquakes or tsunamis that cause an uncontrolled release of hazardous materials into the environment. Such a situation may occur first and foremost in Haifa Bay and Ashdod, due to the multitude of hazardous materials factories stored in the entire area and in the port in particular. The list of dangerous substances in ports is short.

I am concerned about the release of dangerous materials from tanks and pipes, some of them my own age, that will fail under forces at unplanned accelerations and release thousands of tons of toxins into the environment to an exposed population. For example, a simulation of an ammonia leak in the amount of 2,400 tons, which is a small fraction of the amount of ammonia present at any given moment in one of the tanks in Haifa Bay, could kill about 17,000 people, poison about 25,000 who would die without medical intervention within one to three hours, and a more moderate poisoning of About 40,000 more, that the medical intervention can save them only if it is done within many hours or dozens of hours after the poisoning.

In this context, it should be noted that the national reference scenario from July 2004 was reduced under the influence of the potential damages from hazardous materials. As the research progressed, it became clear that the risk assessment in the past was characterized by underestimation. The forecast must be updated, and prepared for it: but first and foremost, one must decide to deal with reality as it is, without trying to dwarf the risk. Adequate knowledge and determination are necessary for this.

Summary
Appropriate prevention and preparation actions can drastically reduce the number of victims during an APR. Abroad there is practical knowledge of how to reduce casualties, but the implementation involves the understanding that AFRAN is a unique situation.

Apprentices are beyond personal experience and beyond common organizational experience. The earthquake in Japan on March 11, 2011 is a painful reminder of this, as are the strong earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, and China in recent years, and the cyclone in Myanmar, which as far as we know has never been seen before.

Dealing with APRN requires appropriate thinking and placement tools for such a case. Any Israeli attempt to deal with AFRNA as a "private case" of war is wrong and will cost many victims.

The author is Afar Nai

The full article was published in Galileo magazine, August 2011