An earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010 killed more than 200,000 people.

A
quake of a similar magnitude in the US killed just one person. Why? Because
richer countries have the resources to take advantage of advances in
earthquake engineering and build resilient buildings. Buildings in earthquake-
prone developing countries are not so sophisticated.

Social scientists predict that by 2050, the number of people living in cities
vulnerable to earthquakes will have trebled. You cant prevent earthquakes
from happening, but you can mitigate the effects and help save a lot of lives,
says Dr Barnali Ghosh, a senior engineer with engineering consultancy Mott
MacDonald.

With a PhD in earthquake engineering from the University of Cambridge,

Ghosh has worked in this field for the past 16 years, and is currently focusing
on the design of a metro system in New Delhi that will be able to withstand a
certain level of earthquake.

Shes also involved in projects to design earthquake-resilient hydro dams in

areas such as Georgia and Pakistan. Hydro power will be important in the
coming years. In the past, engineers have always reacted in the face of
disasters; now the focus has shifted to prevention. Advances in seismology
mean that what was once too risky is now feasible.

Although the UK isnt a high-risk earthquake zone, some universities here

focus on earthquake engineering and research, and many leading engineering
design consultancies, such as Atkins and Arup, have UK bases. While
undergraduate engineering degrees generally dont cover this specialised area,
the universities of Bristol, Surrey, Sheffield and Dundee, plus Imperial College
and University College London, offer specialist postgraduate degrees, and the
job prospects are healthy.

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Our postgraduates are in high demand; there arent many specialists
around, says Professor Ahmed Elghazouli, director of the MSc in earthquake
engineering at Imperial College London. Many find work with large, UK-
based consulting firms.

Insurance firms employ earthquake specialists to carry out risk analyses and
the nuclear industry is another big employer. Even in areas of low risk, such as
the UK, nuclear facilities must be designed to withstand earthquakes, no
matter how unlikely an occurrence.

About 10% of Imperials students, most of whom come from structural

engineering backgrounds, go on to further research: The MSc sets you up well
for this, says Elghazouli. Despite the huge improvements in structural
engineering over the past 40 years, many challenges remain.

The focus now is how to balance risk with cost, designing cost-effective
structures that can minimise the damage of an earthquake particularly in
developing regions such as South America and Asia. In more developed
countries, the onus is on how to keep infrastructure going and minimise the
costs of interruption to businesses.

Each masters course has a slightly different emphasis, but covers the
fundamentals in structural engineering before moving on to more specialist
areas; students at Imperial cover areas as varied as bridge design and non-
linear structural analysis.

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Another big area is retro-fitting existing infrastructure so it might survive an

earthquake, says Ghosh. No two jobs are the same. One day I could be
designing a bridge, the next a nuclear power plant or a dam.
If I can improve the way the built environment
survives in an earthquake I could save a lot of
lives.
Adam Crewe completed a PhD at the University of Bristol in 1999. He now
heads the department of civil engineering, while researching how various
structures respond to earthquakes

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Adam Crewes earthquake table tests the resilience of building models. Photograph: Sam Frost

I work with a shaking table a three metre square platform on eight

hydraulic actuators that can recreate the movement of an earthquake. Its the
only one in the UK.

students

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We use the table to test industrial equipment and models of buildings to see
how they would survive in an earthquake. At the moment Im testing a nuclear
reactor model that weighs around seven tonnes. Most of the testing we do is
on models about a quarter of the size of the real thing. We have a strong
multidisciplinary approach at Bristol, pulling in expertise from across
mechanical, civil engineering and computer science departments.

Research is all about making a difference. If I can even slightly improve the
way the built environment survives in an earthquake I could save a lot of lives.
For example stopping a bridge falling down so an emergency vehicle gets to a
disaster scene quicker, for example.

One future challenge is strengthening low-cost housing in the developing

world. We are good at building new structures that dont fall down in
earthquakes, but you cant apply the same techniques to mud-brick buildings
or historic structures. There are also issues surrounding tsunamis and how to
protect coastal cities in vulnerable zones.