Utopia Talk / Politics / Cuba: magnitude 6.8 earthquake

murder Member	Sun Nov 10 14:37:05 6.8 magnitude earthquake shakes Cuba after hurricanes and blackouts HAVANA (AP) — An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.8 shook eastern Cuba on Sunday, after weeks of hurricanes and blackouts that have left many on the island reeling. The epicenter of the quake was located about 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of Bartolome Maso, Cuba, according to a report by the U.S. Geological Survey. Rumbling was felt across the eastern stretch of Cuba, including in bigger cities like Santiago de Cuba, as well as Holguin and. Guantanamo. Local media in Jamaica also reported that the island felt the tremors. There were no immediate reports of major damage or injuries in Cuba. Residents in Santiago, Cuba’s second-largest city, were left shaken on Sunday. Yolanda Tabío, 76, said that people in the city flocked to the streets and were still nervously sitting in their doorways. She said that she felt at least two aftershocks following the quake, but that among friends and family she hadn’t heard of any damages. “You had to see how everything was moving, the walls, everything,” she told The Associated Press. Others reported hearing screams, adding that the quake was strong and stretched on. On social media, residents in the small town of Pilon reported minor damage, posting photos of crumbling roofs and cracks on building walls, not uncommon in Cuba where many structures are older and in need of repair. The earthquake comes during another tough stretch for Cuba. On Wednesday, Category 3 Hurricane Rafael ripped through western Cuba, with strong winds knocking out power island-wide, destroying hundreds of homes and forcing evacuations of hundreds of thousands of people. Days after, much of the island was still struggling without power. Weeks before in October, the island was also hit by a one-two punch. First, it was hit by island-wide blackouts stretching on for days, a product of the island’s energy crisis. Shortly after, it was slapped by a powerful hurricane that struck the eastern part of the island and killed at least six people. The blackouts and wider discontent among many struggling to get by has stoked small protests across the island. http://apn...8bbf4496a1bbe27a39f80728d63b2d
Sam Adams Member	Sun Nov 10 19:12:02 Medium shallow strike slip to a poorly built soviet style of architecture? Normally id say thats worth quite a bit of fucked up commies but thats a pretty unpopulated region i think.
jergul large member	Sun Nov 10 20:20:23 Soviet architecture is reknown for being robust. I think you are confusing it with US built pre-castro era structures. Amazing how bad stuccoed plaster is when dealing with small natural disasters eh? See any of your natural disasters for how shiite your building and infrastructure practices are.
jergul large member	Sun Nov 10 20:21:48 Soviet stuff is also reknown for ugly and hard to modernize (as it is when plumbing and wiring is sandwiched between reenforced concrete slabs).
Dukhat Member	Sun Nov 10 22:36:22 First no power and then an earthquake. Get fucked commies.
Sam Adams Member	Sun Nov 10 23:48:52 Haha. its not often i agree with duckhat but that is the correct sentiment. "Soviet architecture is reknown for being robust." Lol knew jergul would get butthurt over that one and come in with some inane and obviously comment about how an ancient rotten concrete building is good vs quakes.
jergul large member	Mon Nov 11 01:56:29 It made my eyes bleed. There is a conflict were months of JDAMs and massed arty do little more than break the windows of soviet era apartment buildings. I have been in the basements. Massed pillars 5 feet apart, then a thick, segmented reinforced concrete slab *on top of the pillars* slightly above tiny pillbox like windows, often with steel bunker shutters. They are fortresses. Brutalist. Ugly as hell. Impossible to do properely renovate. Tiny dimensions (like 350 foot 3 bedrooms) Wiring underdimensioned. Piping very tight. Both inside reinforced concrete. A nightmare. Get your burns factually right.
jergul large member	Mon Nov 11 01:58:58 Dukhat Bringing in Puerto Rico is a bit off topic don't you think? :D.
jergul large member	Mon Nov 11 02:04:38 This is an example of why you get things so horribly wrong. You just act with emotion. Soviet architecture must be bad. And look at my nationalist heroes heroically resisting Russian missiles, JDAMs (well better equivalents) and massed arty for months and months and months. Russia must suck. It cannot be that every fucking building is a fucking fortress by paranoid Soviet design. Guess what happens when Russia pushes beyond Soviet building to reach old empire dacha villages and tiny towns. Ukraine melts.
Sam Adams Member	Mon Nov 11 10:39:50 Lol jergul. You most certainly dont want a concrete fortress against quakes. What you actually want is flexibility.
Sam Adams Member	Mon Nov 11 10:51:45 Concrete isnt quite the worst building material against quakes but it isnt good. You have do a lot of extra work... mainly breaking the concrete down into small segments with much more flexible joints and allowing each segment to wiggle around a little. Base isolation helps quite a bit. Steel reinforcement helps a little but cannot keep a concrete structure intact on its own. Large concrete buildings with only steel reinforcement will fail in large numbers. And you really dont want to be in a concrete building when it fails.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Mon Nov 11 11:39:19 Indeed, earthquake resistance requires flexibility and the ability to dissipate energy, these are characteristics fundamentally different from the ability to withstand blasts and projectiles. Reinforced concrete if not designed (as sam mentions) for seismic load is rigid and prone to sheering or collapse during earthquakes. Soviet era housing was not generally designed to withstand earthquakes, but to be quick, cheap and indeed durable in war. Look at the 1988 earthquake in Armenia - a complete disaster - however, some houses did better, likely because they were designed to withstand earth quakes. Ironically wooden frame houses like dachas fare much better during earthquakes because they are flexible. Would not do well against bombs or artillery.
Rugian Member	Mon Nov 11 11:47:08 Yeah whatever their durability against earthquakes, that's an entirely separate question from their durability against missile attacks. Brutalist architecture made it in the USSR because it was cheaper than Stalinist architecture. That's it.
jergul large member	Mon Nov 11 12:01:28 Sammy What part of a slab standing on a forest of sunken pillars did you not understand? It provides the flexibility you want against bombs, arty, or earthquakes.
jergul large member	Mon Nov 11 12:06:25 Ruggy Its because the Soviets were completely paranoid and had captured thousands from the Todt organization (the German equivalent of Army of Engineers in the US with a particular affinity for steel and concrete) along with millions of German POWs as a workforce. They were not planning on losing wwiii the same way they might have lost wwii. Buildings like that are ludicrously hard to destroy. See Vuhledar for example. Russia tried demolishing that for more than a year. It finally encircled the Soviet apartment buildings that remained standing. Still are in fact.
murder Member	Mon Nov 11 13:20:18 "They were not planning on losing wwiii the same way they might have lost wwii. Buildings like that are ludicrously hard to destroy." The goal of war isn't to destroy buildings. Cut off their water supply, and everyone dies, same as any other building.
jergul large member	Mon Nov 11 13:35:39 Oh gawd. Why did the nazis not think of that. They should have just cut off the USSRs watersupply.
jergul large member	Mon Nov 11 13:36:29 Stalingrad? Easy peasy. Dam the Volga upstream. Then the defenders would have been in trouble.
Rugian Member	Mon Nov 11 13:49:10 Jergul I'm pretty sure the Soviet pivot to brutalism was based on a mixture of cost and ideological conformity. Concrete is cheap, durable, readily available, and decently easy to install. Brutalism as a style represents a stark rejection of pre-modernism and aligns well with Communist ideals about the abolition of wealth and class. I don't think it was a primary goal of Soviet builders to develop new buildings that could double as military fortresses. If that was a major factor in turning towards brutalist archicture, then I've never heard of it. ...although if that was a reason, it would at least be more justifiable than the real motivation behind Brutalism..."hey, our ancestors made too many gorgeous buildings, let's instead make the ugliest structures possible as a form of rejecting the old ways. Fuck you Kaiser Wilhelm!" Ugh. Architects and artists are fucking children sometimes.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Mon Nov 11 14:04:08 What can be, unburdened blhas been.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Mon Nov 11 14:05:06 What can be, unburdened blhas been.
murder Member	Mon Nov 11 15:06:50 "Oh gawd. Why did the nazis not think of that. They should have just cut off the USSRs watersupply." I don't know, but the tactic is as old a war.
Sam Adams Member	Mon Nov 11 15:10:23 "Buildings like that are ludicrously hard to destroy. " Wrong. It is actually very easy for a quake to destroy. Again, concrete sucks and the soviets didnt know and/or didnt care to do the things to make it safe. Keep in mind these are the people too lazy/cheap/stupid to build a shield around their nuclear cores.
jergul large member	Mon Nov 11 15:14:04 Murder That is what happened at Vuhledar. The Soviet style blocks were semi-encircled, so Ukraine extracted its forces as best it could. After holding firm for more than a year. The whole problem with Donbas for the Russian is the network of Soviet era buildings. They are really good defensive positions. We see this clearer now that Russia has pushed through portions of network. Ruggy You would be wrong. City districts along any imaginable route Western armies might take were built as defensive structures. Moscow had 12 defensive rings of built up fortifiable around it. I am not joking about the paranoid stuff. The old addage that everyone plans for winning the last war they fought holds true in this case.
jergul large member	Mon Nov 11 15:15:41 Sammy Why dont you take a step outside and admire the stucco, plywood and tar paper your house is built of.
jergul large member	Mon Nov 11 15:17:05 So here we are. I am calling Soviets paranoid and you guys are "no, no. Not at all".
Sam Adams Member	Mon Nov 11 16:05:05 No jergul, what we are actually saying is that how you resist a quake is not how you resist artillery. You seem to be struggling to understand that the two designs are completely different. My wood frame house resists quakes very well, but would do less well against other threats. A cheap soviet concrete blockhouse might resist artillery better but will break utterly with a little lateral ground accel.
jergul large member	Mon Nov 11 18:16:56 Sammy You soft wood framed house. I fixed that for you. Why not go full Japan 1945 and buy a house made from bamboo and paper? Oh, right. Forest fires, wind storms and volcanoes are the problem in your neck of the woods. Lets hope nature does not huff and puff and blow your house down. They are not cheap. They are overengineered as fuck. The apartments are tiny with multiple load bearing walls. A floating reinforced concrete foundation slab resting on a forest of pillars provides additional earthquake resistance.
jergul large member	Mon Nov 11 18:25:59 http://www...ty5iKqxOgSw9nm1TgGdUmTbW1dBcWw Thereyougo. Since you seem to think there is only one way to build in earthquak resistance. Slabs sliding on pillars was nicely. "When and earthquake hits, only the base moves while the structure remains steady". They are built to resist ground burst megaton weapons (well, not at ground zero). You seriously dont get how paranoid Soviets were about a new war.
Sam Adams Member	Mon Nov 11 18:48:22 Yes jergul, that is called base isolation and is a basic step in earthquake proofing, mentioned previously in this thread that you seem to have missed. Soviets did not use it in residential structures
obaminated Member	Mon Nov 11 23:49:53 Why is jergul arguing this? Is he that much of a Soviet Homer he has to argue concrete buildings are good against earthquakes?
jergul large member	Tue Nov 12 00:57:50 Sammy Yes, they used it in the classical Soviet apartment blocks we are talking about. Forest of pillars, then a floating slab. Obam Soviet paranoia is a virtue in your mind? Geeze, you people are so dumb.
Sam Adams Member	Tue Nov 12 10:45:11 "Yes, they used it in the classical Soviet apartment blocks we are talking about." No they didnt.
jergul large member	Tue Nov 12 11:55:57 Yes they did. I saw it myself. But thank you for your opinion Mr. does not travel much.
Sam Adams Member	Tue Nov 12 15:26:11 "I saw it myself." No you didnt.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Tue Nov 12 15:45:09 Lets trust Jergul and not the outcome of the 1988 Aremnian earth quake, after all, he saw it with his own eyes.
Sam Adams Member	Tue Nov 12 16:44:10 Good point about armenia. A very good case study for the failure of soviets. Similar quakes kill 100-1000 times fewer people when they hit la or sfo.
jergul large member	Tue Nov 12 17:02:22 Sammy Yes I did. Armenia is Armenia. They stole the cement and built the structures out of sand. The Post Morten was quite extensive, involved Western peeps as it was Perestroika and was measure against the yardstick of "why did the buildings not hold up like they were supposed to by design and survive earthquakes?" As nimi knows, but he just suppresses information he dislikes.
Rugian Member	Tue Nov 12 17:12:50 Jergul I'd be participating in this discussion but I'm still stuck on your claim of postwar Muscovite residences being built for defensive purposes. I knew about the historic road rings and some googling revealed a few anti-air rings, but 12 rings made out of residential construction? Can't find it. What I *can* find is what i already know - post-Stalinist architecture was based on cost and speed considerations, and construction was often not meant to last for more than a few decades. So, uh...yeah. [citation needed]
Sam Adams Member	Tue Nov 12 18:44:40 "why did the buildings not hold up like they were supposed to by design and survive earthquakes?" Soviet buildings are not designed to stand up to quakes. Mainly they didnt know how, and to a lesser extent couldnt afford it.
jergul large member	Wed Nov 13 01:47:10 Ruggy Danm you. Its complicated. The Brezhnevka's have design codes. I am still looking into it. No, not like that. Designated fortress city/towns/villages/city districts that formed multiple rings around Moscow. 12 in total. Sammy Armenian corruption. They were supposed to have stood up to earthquakes. Armenia is on top of a complex fault line system. And just no. Have you seen many of the Soviet metros (subway you ignoramous)? You are wrong. Again. Stick in your lane and stop being dumb.
Sam Adams Member	Wed Nov 13 10:24:18 "They were supposed to" Lol. Lots of that in socialism.
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