By which I mean what is the actual cause of death for most people killed by earthquakes? I was reading a list of the 10 deadliest earthquakes ever and a number happened hundreds or even over a 1,000 years ago. This would be in a time where I presume people would have been less likely to live in large buildings and get buried under rubble. So how exactly were they killed?
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They might have been less likely to live in large buildings, but they still lived in buildings, and they mostly lived in **much, much less well-built** buildings.
Even 100 years ago, many people built their own homes themselves. In poor parts of the world, people still do. Most people are not engineers, or anything close to engineers, and do not build their homes with any advanced understanding of how to engineer them to withstand natural disasters.
If your people have lived in the same area for a long time, you might have cultural knowledge of how to do that (in the sense that you’ll build the same way your parents did and that that method has adapted over time), but that cultural knowledge often trades off other factors, too.
For example, [adobe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe) is a very useful building material that can survive for many centuries and is cheap and easy to make, but it happens to be quite horrible at withstanding earthquakes. Native peoples of the Americas used adobe all over the place because, well, you want to have walls and you don’t have a lot of resources because you’re a pre-industrial society, so that’s what you’ve got. Yes, it’ll collapse in the earthquake you might have once every couple centuries, but you’ll have walls for those couple centuries, and you’re a pre-industrial society that is pretty used to people randomly dying for reasons out of your control anyway.
Modern houses, especially in earthquake-prone areas, are built differently. They’re built to have *tensile* strength, not just compressive strength (for example, concrete is excellent at compressive loads and terrible with tensile loads, so we reinforce it with steel that can handle tension). They’re built in deeper and stronger foundations, which for large buildings are built to absorb much of the force of an earthquake. They’re built with much wider safety margins in mind. And they’re much more resistant to fire, which was a major contributor to death and property damage in natural disasters in the past.
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