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“Ask anyone: what is the deadliest white powder sold on the street, first synthesized in the nineteenth century? Heroin? Cocaine? they may suggest. Crystal meth? The answer? Portland cement.”
— The Cure for Catastrophe, Robert Muir-Wood
— The Cure for Catastrophe, Robert Muir-Wood
“To allow an untrained builder to create a building out of concrete without the attentions of a structural engineer is like giving a child a loaded automatic weapon.”
— The Cure for Catastrophe, Robert Muir-Wood
— The Cure for Catastrophe, Robert Muir-Wood
“The collapse of the WTC towers was shattering and extraordinary. People in N Europe, US, Japan, go through a lifetime never witnessing a building collapse. Yet, if you are one of the 12 million inhabitants of Cairo, the collapse of a building would seem an everyday occurrence.”
“If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.”
— Robert Muir-Wood quoting the Hammurabi Code, ca. 1700 BC
— Robert Muir-Wood quoting the Hammurabi Code, ca. 1700 BC
“How would we now rewrite the ’The story of the three little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf’ to reflect earthquake construction in poor countries?”
— The Cure for Catastrophe, Robert Muir-Wood
— The Cure for Catastrophe, Robert Muir-Wood
The seemingly absurd but highly interesting reason U.S. mobile homes suddenly became more tornado resistant starting in 1995, but why not? From The Cure for Catastrophe by Robert Muir-Wood.
On how the first professor of seismology, Fusakichi Omori (1868-1923) traveled to San Francisco to consult with the leading American students of earthquakes only to find there were none. Studying earthquakes was not politically correct in 1906.
“Professor John C. Branner wrote of this time: ’There was a general disposition that almost amounted to concerted action for the purpose of suppressing all mention of that earthquake. . . . There hasn’t been an earthquake [was] the sentiment we heard.’” — Robert Muir-Wood
On how Jesuit Priests in 1954 finally made the point that gave the Americans their first proper seismological research network: they found the Bomb.
Muir-Wood on how Daniel Defoe invented crowdsourcing and published the first book of modern journalism: The Storm, 1704, about the Great Storm of 1703, today believed to've been a Category 2 Storm which killed between eight and sixteen thousand people. The book is still in print.
