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The Haiti quake likely set a modern record for deaths per magnitude of earthquake "solely as a function of too many people crammed into a city that wasn't meant to have that many people and have an earthquake," said University of Miami geologist Tim Dixon. Disaster experts say they've seen more deaths especially from quakes that wouldn't have been as bad decades ago. They point to two in Turkey and India
-- a 1999 earthquake in Izmit that killed 18,000 and the 2001 disaster that killed 20,000 in Bhuj. "Look at some of the big ones recently," said Debarati Guha-Sapir, director of the WHO's disaster epidemiology research center. "Had the Izmit or Bhuj quakes happened 30 years ago, the events would have been relatively insignificant as the population of these cities were a third of what it was when it did happen. Increasing population density makes a small event into a big one." Disaster and earthquake experts say the problem will only worsen. Of the 130 cities worldwide with more than 1 million population, more than half are on fault lines, making them more prone to earthquakes, Bilham said. "I've calculated more than 400 million people at risk just from those," he said. Developing nations, where the population is booming, also don't pay attention to earthquake preparedness, Bilham said. "If you have a problem feeding yourself, you're not really going to worry about earthquakes." He said he when he went to Haiti after the January quake, he had hope that construction would be quake-proof because of the emphasis on it. Instead, people rebuilt their houses their old unsafe ways. Another reason quakes seems worse is that we're paying attention more. The phenomenon of Haiti quickly followed by the 8.8 in Chile got everyone's attention. But it won't last, said disaster researcher Dennis Mileti, a former seismic safety commissioner for the state of California. "People are paying attention to the violent planet we've always lived in," Mileti said. "Come back in another six months if there has been no earthquakes, most people will have forgotten it again." ___ On the Net: National Earthquake Information Center: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/neic/
[Associated
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