We are increasingly seeing the effects of building collapse due to earthquakes in regions such as Haiti and collapse due to poor workmanship such as the recent building collapses in Kiambu. With rapid urbanization, more high-rise buildings are coming up in major towns creating perfect recipes for disaster as people get trapped underneath tons and tons of concrete incase the building unfortunately collapses –either due to an earthquake or poor workmanship. There are solutions to avoid this kind of disaster by having flexible steel grid supported buildings with light-weight sandwich panel wall infill.
Several major towns in Kenya such as Nakuru sit right in the middle of the Rift Valley which is a seismically unstable region and earthquakes are not known to give notice before they strike.
Measures should be taken to ensure that there are mechanisms in place to give early warning to avoid disasters.
Countries that are prone to earthquakes such as Japan have an average of 40% of new high-rise buildings coming up in Steel structural frames–one of the world’s highest-this is partly dues to steel’s ability to resist the impact of severe earthquakes. Past earthquakes in USA [San Francisco-1906, Long Beach-1933, and Japan [Kanto -1923] during the first part of this century gave engineers confidence in steel as a reliable material for earthquake resistant design. Read more on http://www.a4architect.c...red-steel-buildings-peb/