The Mheda Journal

Is it just me, or has their been an inordinate number of earthquakes lately? A 7.0 in Haiti on January 12, the 8.8 monster in Chile on February 27, the what-would-normally-be-considered large 5.5 in Turkey on March 8, and then another 7.0 rocker in Chile today. The devastation and despair these have caused have been well-documented and I don’t want to go into detail about that here. (Though I would be remiss not to once again mention the American Logistics Aid Network, of which MHEDA is a major contributor. Click the link above to learn more.)

I’m thinking about it more in terms of building codes. A colleague of mine mentioned earlier today how it’s times like these when those annoying building codes that sometimes seem so frivolous don’t seem so bad after all. Hearing the stories of crumbling, cheaply made buildings in some of these places makes you glad, at least for the short-term, that we have codes and requirements in place.

Now, I don’t know what sort of building codes, if any, are in place in Chile, Haiti and Turkey. Maybe the damage would have been the same — granted, an 8.8-magnitude quake would likely do pretty severe damage even to a strong, secure building. But it does make one realize that those codes are there for a reason. Up here in usually-earthquake-free upstate New York , here’s hoping that I don’t need to ever find out.

For more info on building codes in material handling, read this archived article in The MHEDA Journal Online.

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Tags: disaster relief, material handling, rack, storage & handling

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at 4:32 pm and is filed under material handling, storage and handling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.