Tuesday, September 7, 2010

I was impressed by the news story coming out of New Zealand last week regarding the 7.0 (Richter) earthquake which hit Christchurch, the country's second largest city...with no fatalities.

Every time I hear about an earthquake—especially a big one of 7.0 or more—I think about the quake that everyone who had connections with Turkey in the late 90s thinks about—the killer quake of August 17, 1999.

I had just gotten back to Istanbul from a five-month trip through India, SE Asia, and China, and was crashing at the apartment of some friends while I hung out in town for a week and prepared to move back to the US and begin an MA at Princeton.

I'd been back just a couple of days—I think I'd returned on the 15th—and was sitting on the balcony drinking a beer with a friend. It was late at night—about three o'clock in the morning—when suddenly I heard the noise of a large plant sitting in the corner of the room swishing against the wall. My first thought was that some sort of animal had gotten into the apartment and was somehow stuck in the plant.

Instead, it was the beginning of an agonizing minute or so, with the electricity immediately shutting off and the building shaking back and forth violently, a horrible banging noise repeating itself incessantly to remind us vaguely of the structural damage that each shift was inflicting upon the building we were in.

After about fifteen seconds the shifts started dying down a bit, the banging tempo slowed to 4/4 from 2/4...but then sped up again, getting even faster than before, as the building also started swaying even faster than before....

Until it stopped. After about forty seconds—that I'll never forget.

We all spent the next hour or so rehashing things and watching traffic stream out of town. From the balcony, we didn't see a single electric light on among the literally thousands of apartments we could see. There was no electricity working in the city.

For the first time in seven years of living in Istanbul, I could see stars—thousands of them.

The next few days—I had purchased a ticket back in February to take me to the US on August 20—were spent in the city where I'd spent the first decade of my real adulthood, ages 22 to 30, as I wandered around in neighborhoods that looked like ghost towns. At night tens of thousands of people were sleeping outside, too afraid to go back to their apartments. Most of the shops were closed.

The Istanbul earthquake had a magnitude of 7.6 and killed about twenty thousand people. About a month later,  a 7.6 earthquake hit Taipei (where, coincidentally, my brother was living at the time) and about 2300 people died. The San Francisco ("World Series") earthquake of 1989 measured 6.9 and 63 people were killed.

And now, 7.0 in New Zealand and no dead.

Yeah, yeah, I know....population density, etc. But you know something? I think having a solid public infrastructure—including a strong regulatory one, to make sure people are following the laws when they do things like build houses or drill for oil (or transport it) —probably matters to a certain degree, don't you?

Keep this in mind the next time you hear about a bridge collapsing in Minnesota or a pipeline falling apart in Michigan. Republicans and many Democrats have been whittling down the tax base for communities so long that, from crummy American airports to dangerous American energy networks, our infrastructure is crumbling. And now, I think, we'll get even more of it if Bush's tax credits are extended.


A bad sign

But that's the plan, isn't it? Bankrupt the state by making taxes impossibly low and spending trillions on war, and then cut social services because we can't afford them anymore.

So I was glad to see yesterday that Obama is dedicating $50 to rebuilding infrastructure in the US.

That's a nice start. Also nice would be to see the government begin improving its regulatory infrastructure (SEC, FDA, EPA, you name it), which has been gutted and staffed with industry types since the Reagan administration.

That's hard, especially during an era of perhaps unprecedented corporate involvement in campaign financing.

But whatever, $50 billion is $50 billion, and I'll take what I can get at this point.