{"id":259,"date":"2007-01-15T12:24:03","date_gmt":"2007-01-15T08:24:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=259"},"modified":"2013-12-05T02:22:12","modified_gmt":"2013-12-05T01:22:12","slug":"sakhalin-island-on-shaky-ground","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/259\/","title":{"rendered":"Sakhalin Island On Shaky Ground"},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning our neighbouring Kuril Islands were thumped by a massive earthquake<\/a> measuring 8.3 on the Richter scale.\u00a0 Sitting in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk I felt nothing, but the news reports say the Kuril Islands have been partially evacuated following fears of a tsunami.<\/p>\n

It is well known that Japan lies in an active earthquake zone, and so\u00a0too does Sakhalin.\u00a0 Indeed, of the 12 most\u00a0powerful earthquakes<\/a> recorded since 1900,\u00a0one of them occurred off the Kuril Islands and\u00a0a further two off Kamchatka.\u00a0 In 1995, 2,000 people were killed in the town of Neftegorsk\u00a0in the north of\u00a0Sakhalin Island when an earthquake (.pdf, see page 13)<\/a> of magnitude 7.6 struck the town, causing the total collapse of all seventeen large-block buildings in the town.\u00a0 The earthquake struck at night, when most of their inhabitants were at home.\u00a0 An earthquake<\/a> of magnitude 6 struck Sakhalin Island in 2000, but thankfully the ground has been mainly steady since then.\u00a0 This is just as well, because the Neftegorsk earthquake demonstrated all too well the poor performance of Soviet era housing – which constitutes almost all the accommodation in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, including my own apartment\u00a0– during a seismic event.\u00a0 Concerns over the ability of the structures and pipelines of the Sakhalin II project to withstand an earthquake have formed the basis of much of the opposition to the project from environmental groups, fears the project’s owners<\/a> say are unfounded.<\/p>\n

That you live in an earthquake zone and are a potential target for a building collapse or a tsunami\u00a0are easy things to forget for a Brit, but in any case there is precious little any of us can do about it.\u00a0 All I can do is\u00a0hope that\u00a0the ground will be nice and steady during my stay on the island.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning our neighbouring Kuril Islands were thumped by a massive earthquake measuring 8.3 on the Richter scale.\u00a0 Sitting in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk I felt nothing, but the news reports say the Kuril Islands have been partially evacuated following fears of a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[49,46],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1924,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259\/revisions\/1924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}