How can earthquakes affect people

Any little noise, they run for cover. Some are so traumatized that a well-meaning, but an unexpected touch from a friend can cause them to scream out in fright. Their body is always on high alert for another threat to their safety and this makes them feel jumpy. Also, some of them who are directly involved in the incident will show lots of psychological symptoms that look like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder PTSD such as intense fear, nightmares, and flashbacks, or they continuously experience the event in their head.

In addition, Search and Rescue teams who look out for survivors in the collapsed buildings can also be affected. Yes, this is their job, but it must be terrible to find different dead bodies when searching for survivors. Apart from social and mental effects, earthquakes can affect humans economically. Governments have to take care of the damage caused by this great disaster.

As we all know that earthquakes cause infrastructures to collapse, shops, reservoirs dams, and hospitals are destroyed during the incident. Governments have to spend a huge amount of money to rebuild the places destroyed.

Moreover, this natural disaster causes the spending of the funds to distribute medicine and food to victims. And, Stock Markets are disrupted causing the market crash or recession. Furthermore, those who have investments in that particular area may decide to leave.

And if this happens, it will result in unemployment and cause loss of job opportunities. An Earthquake also affects the human environment. Damage to the environment during an earthquake causes the destruction of properties and loss of lives more than the actual earthquake. This is a very deadly disease called coccidioidomycosis or Valley Fever.

Broken water pipes caused by this natural disaster can rupture gas, flood lands, break fuel, and electrical lines which can lead to a fire. Also, the hazardous material spilled introduces radioactive, medical, sewage, and poisonous material into the water, air, and earth. Aftershocks of this natural hazard can cause new tsunamis to form and hit the land before communities have time to recover from the original damage. And when a lot of tsunamis hit the seaside area, it can cause great erosion, thereby demolishing buildings in its way.

Due to this hazard, electricity, sanitation systems, and water of any place is destroyed and the extent of the damage makes the early renovation of these amenities very hard because rescuing people trapped in the rubble is the main concern of the government and rescue teams.

Therefore the affected people face the difficulty of sanitation, hygiene, and power. Potable and clean drinking water becomes a problem. Earthquakes do not only leave permanent marks in the environment but also affect human lives.

In conclusion, the world has experienced numerous earthquakes in years. Larger earthquakes shake longer because they rupture a larger area than smaller earthquakes do.

Earthquakes can cause massive damage to large infrastructures, and repairing or replacing these can take a long time. Bridges and overpasses that are damaged have to be rebuilt, and traffic has to be re-routed during the rebuilding process. Bridges and overpasses that were not damaged or demolished have to be inspected for safety, and this also causes traffic to be rerouted, causing confusion and traffic jams for motorists.

Resonant frequency Building design is also important. A collapsed highway in the Oakland area of San Francisco: large, unsupported sections are more vulnerable to collapse. Loma Prieta earthquake, Wilshire, U.

You may also be interested in. Discovering Geology Discovering Geology introduces a range of geoscience topics to school-age students and learners of all ages. Earth hazards The Earth beneath our feet is constantly shifting and moving, and violently with catastrophic and immediate results.

Earthquakes Earthquakes are among the most deadly natural hazards. What causes earthquakes? Where do earthquakes occur? Where earthquakes occur around the world and in the UK. How are earthquakes detected? Was this page helpful? Yes No. These spreading deposits compressed bridges over the channels, buckled decks, thrust sedimentary beds over abutments, and shifted and tilted abutments and piers.

Lateral spreads are destructive particularly to pipelines. In , a number of major pipeline breaks occurred in the city of San Francisco during the earthquake because of lateral spreading. Breaks of water mains hampered efforts to fight the fire that ignited during the earthquake. Thus, rather inconspicuous ground-failure displacements of less than 7 feet were largely responsible for the devastation to San Francisco in Flow failures, consisting of liquefied soil or blocks of intact material riding on a layer of liquefied soil, are the most catastrophic type of ground failure caused by liquefaction.

These failures commonly move several tens of feet and, if geometric conditions permit, several tens of miles. Flows travel at velocities as great as many tens of miles per hour.

Flow failures usually form in loose saturated sands or silts on slopes greater than 3 degrees. Flow failures can originate either underwater or on land. Many of the largest and most damaging flow failures have taken place underwater in coastal areas. For example, submarine flow failures carried away large sections of port facilities at Seward, Whittier, and Valdez, Alaska, during the Prince William Sound earthquake.

These flow failures, in turn, generated large sea waves that overran parts of the coastal area, causing additional damage and casualties. Flow failures on land have been catastrophic, especially in other countries. For example, the Kansu, China, earthquake induced several flow failures as much as 1 mile in length and breadth, killing an estimated , people. Loss of Bearing Strength - When the soil supporting a building or some other structure liquefies and loses strength, large deformations can occur within the soil, allowing the structure to settle and tip.

The most spectacular example of bearing-strength failures took place during the Niigata, Japan, earthquake. During that event, several four-story buildings of the Kwangishicho apartment complex tipped as much as 60 degrees. Most of the buildings were later jacked back into an upright position, underpinned with piles, and reused. Soils that liquefied at Niigata typify the general subsurface geometry required for liquefaction-caused bearing failures: a layer of saturated, cohesionless soil sand or silt extending from near the ground surface to a depth of about the width of the building.

Past experience has shown that several types of landslides take place in conjunction with earthquakes. The most abundant types of earthquake induced landslides are rock falls and slides of rock fragments that form on steep slopes. Shallow debris slides forming on steep slopes and soil and rock slumps and block slides forming on moderate to steep slopes also take place, but they are less abundant.

Reactivation of dormant slumps or block slides by earthquakes is rare. Large earthquake-induced rock avalanches, soil avalanches, and underwater landslides can be very destructive. Rock avalanches originate on over-steepened slopes in weak rocks. One of the most spectacular examples occurred during the Peruvian earthquake when a single rock avalanche killed more than 18, people; a similar, but less spectacular, failure in the Hebgen Lake, Montana, earthquake resulted in 26 deaths.

Soil avalanches occur in some weakly cemented fine-grained materials, such as loess, that form steep stable slopes under non-seismic conditions. Many loess slopes failed during the New Madrid, Missouri, earthquakes of