Earthquakes in Croatia - deaths caused by unregulated buildings?

[Rev. Rye]

At the end of the last year and the beginning of this year, there have been some relatively strong earthquakes in Petrinja and Sisak, towns in Croatia near the border with Bosnia. They caused around 30 deaths. Since then, Croatian media often claim most or all of those deaths could have been avoided if the buildings were built according to regulations. That is, they claim the buildings that crashed and killed people in the earthquake were not actually properly built, and that this is because the regulations were not enforced enough (and that includes some government buildings). While it is tempting to believe that we can prevent deaths from earthquakes simply by following regulations, I ask myself if what the media is doing is just blaming the victim. I have no idea how to evaluate the statement that most or all of those deaths could have been avoided by following the laws related to building buildings. What do you think about that?

No, that’s blaming the architects who thought it would be a good idea to cut corners. And while it may be an exaggeration to claim they could have saved all the lives lost if they had done it properly, this line of reasoning isn’t unprecedented. Remember the Grenfell Towers fire in 2017?





72 people died in the fire, and it happened because the building’s owners were cheap and, during a recent renovation, installed a type of cladding that, once the initial fire started, caused the fire to travel up the building, not helped by the fact that the insulation wound up being extremely flammable. It also didn’t help that there was a rule telling people to stay in their flats during a fire unless it was directly affecting them, a rule which would only have helped in a building that wasn’t built like Grenfell was. Frankly, there was a massive smorgasbord of ignored regulations that led to the disaster, and the people who lived there weren’t responsible for any of it. I suspect that if I looked into the Croatian cases, it might be similar.