The thread for the very sad stuff

[Morticia Iunia Bruti]

[Flinn]

They are alive, but damn, that hurts

[Morticia Iunia Bruti]

It really hurts... Even more, when you can do nothing in their mourning

[Flinn]

I had to deal with earthquakes for all my life, and while death is death no matter what, there's something about the sudden havoc caused by them that makes everything a 1000 times worse.

Poor man

[Morticia Iunia Bruti]

You can't really prepare on a sudden and unexpected death case in the family...

[Ukiah]

This happened before dawn. Most of the people there were in their homes and sleeping. And the aftershock that came later during the day was unusually strong.

[Flinn]

More than 41k deaths, with that kind of earthquake it means little where you are when it hits.

And sometimes it's better at night than at day, ie. the earthquake in L'Aquila hit by night, but the most damage was made to (middle age) old public building, like the Prefecture and the University, while most of homes (where the people were at night) are relatively new.. to make it short they calculated than instead of 300 deaths if it had hit on day time, they would have been 10 times. Worst case in that event was the destruction of the Students' House, which was supposed to be fully anti-seismic, but fell down like it was made of , because of bad construction (they used sea sand instead of proper sand for the concrete to save on the costs) ... even worse, 15 days before the structure was evacuated because they said it might be unsafe, but after only 3 hours they were allowed back. 8 lads died there.

While it is of course case dependent, I'm confident to say that most of the deaths caused by natural disasters, in general, are our own fault.

[Ukiah]

(they used sea sand instead of proper sand for the concrete to save on the costs)

Sea sand! I sense corruption. I think the salt would weaken the walls. I hope they learn from this. Many countries became strict on safety because of the mistakes and corruptions in their old past.

[Flinn]

It was corruption indeed, because those who had to verify the quality of the work, closed both their eyes. In the end only 4 people have been sentenced, 3 of them to 4 years, one to 2 1/2 .. of course they didn't serve even one day in prison, because of how the whole judiciary process work in Italy. Ofc the families have been refunded, but that was at our (State expense), because those convicted fellas were all public employees back at the time (the only imputable individual who was a private, the CEO of the company who did the works, died way before 2009).

edit: just for the sake of clarity, and to be fair to our fantastic judicial system: in the first and second sentence there's no mention about the bad quality of materials, but just about improper restoration works, with tons and tons of extenuating circumstances for those fellas.. otherwise 4 years for the death of 8 people would be crazy, even for Italy.

Don't ever think of coming here for anything else than holidays

[b0leg]

There is no proper regulation in Turkey. You're free to build as as you want, probably with a little bribe. This whole thing could've been avoided had the state actually cared for regulating buildings, but no. They even "forgave" buildings which were previously confiscated for being unlawful to gain votes from the public.

[Flinn]

Happens not only in Turkey, sadly.

[Flinn]

James Stewart after his wife died refused to have his pacemaker battery changed. He said “I'm going to be with Gloria now!"



This is both sad and great, look at how happy they were. The real sad thing here is that in our modern society we have forgotten that true love, though very rare, does exist.