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quake of a similar magnitude in the US killed just one person. Why? Because
richer countries have the resources to take advantage of advances in
earthquake engineering and build resilient buildings. Buildings in earthquake-
prone developing countries are not so sophisticated.
Social scientists predict that by 2050, the number of people living in cities
vulnerable to earthquakes will have trebled. You cant prevent earthquakes
from happening, but you can mitigate the effects and help save a lot of lives,
says Dr Barnali Ghosh, a senior engineer with engineering consultancy Mott
MacDonald.
Insurance firms employ earthquake specialists to carry out risk analyses and
the nuclear industry is another big employer. Even in areas of low risk, such as
the UK, nuclear facilities must be designed to withstand earthquakes, no
matter how unlikely an occurrence.
The focus now is how to balance risk with cost, designing cost-effective
structures that can minimise the damage of an earthquake particularly in
developing regions such as South America and Asia. In more developed
countries, the onus is on how to keep infrastructure going and minimise the
costs of interruption to businesses.
Each masters course has a slightly different emphasis, but covers the
fundamentals in structural engineering before moving on to more specialist
areas; students at Imperial cover areas as varied as bridge design and non-
linear structural analysis.
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Adam Crewes earthquake table tests the resilience of building models. Photograph: Sam Frost
students
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We use the table to test industrial equipment and models of buildings to see
how they would survive in an earthquake. At the moment Im testing a nuclear
reactor model that weighs around seven tonnes. Most of the testing we do is
on models about a quarter of the size of the real thing. We have a strong
multidisciplinary approach at Bristol, pulling in expertise from across
mechanical, civil engineering and computer science departments.
Research is all about making a difference. If I can even slightly improve the
way the built environment survives in an earthquake I could save a lot of lives.
For example stopping a bridge falling down so an emergency vehicle gets to a
disaster scene quicker, for example.