The Conversation

Encasing old buildings in cheap plastic mesh could have saved lives in Nepal

Author: The Conversation

Few of Nepal's houses use modern anti-earthquake engineering.Diego Azubel / EPA

When a 9.0 magnitude earthquake hit Japan in March 2011, I was on the 9th floor of a 20-storey Tokyo hotel. The quake was one of the five most powerful since modern record keeping began in 1900, and it lasted for around three minutes – an unusually long time.

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