Earthquake

Earthquake

The earthquake happened in Sichuan province have become a very popular topic between Chinese people, because the earthquake happens in a same place twice in recent years, and both of them are very high level earthquake and lead to really bad results. So, people begin to ask, why couldn’t we prevent the earthquake from happening and minimize the lost?

 

Ideas of government

1.      The earthquake cannot be predicted. Although china has a Seismological Bureau, however, western country cannot 100 percent predict the earthquake, the technology of predicting the earthquake is far behind those development country, so, in the present, the Seismological Bureau in china can just do some research of the of the geology after the earthquake happens.    

2.      After the first earthquake, Chinese government rebuilds the house in the earthquake area and promise that the material that used to build the house is reliable and it could resist the 8 level earthquake. 

 

Ideas of people

1.      If government predicts that this place is going to have an earthquake, and letting people know will only cost government to lose a lot of money because people will not work if there is going to be an earthquake. Often times the government cannot 100 percent predict the earthquake, so, the government is afraid to take responsibility to the laws of shutting down the production if there is actually no earthquake.     

2.      Chinese people always think that government officials are doing nothing every day because they highly paid, so they do not really have to work for money, they can just sitting in the office reading the newspaper with money keeps coming in.so, naturally, predicting earthquake is impossible for government officials because they actually do not need to develop the technology to predict the earthquake. The earthquake in china does not happen a lot, so, in most of the time, no one really cares what the Seismological Bureau is doing. So, when people heard that the budget of the Seismological Bureau is over billions of money a year, people become really angry with that because they keep getting a huge amount of money from people and their duty is just to do some research after the earthquake happens, this is absolutely has no positive effect on protecting people’s life.

3.      China’s economic situation has long changed business people morale and ethical senses; they are no longer caring public’s well-being but how to make more money and how to make money fast. So, businessmen will use cheap materials to build homes in order to save money, which would lead to a lot of death in the earthquake because those materials are not really strong. On the other hand, business people always bribes Chinese government officials to ignore what they are doing as using cheap materials for build homes.

 

First of all, I think the government officials are generally doing nothing today because they get highly paid which would leads to the slow development of technology. Also, because the earthquake do not always happens, so that they tend to think the possibility of earthquake is fairly low, and just stay in the office to wait for retire, especially for those government officials at higher position. I find evidence saying that before the wenchuan earthquake happens, there is a government employee has already predict there will be an earthquake in wenchuan, however, when he reported to his boss so many times, his boss ignored him and did not give any responds. After that, he sent a letter to the court of justice to report his boss for neglecting his duty.  However, the court of justice refused to register the case because that boss has been a “friend” with the court of justice for many years. From this case, we could easily see that now days the government officials are not even trying to perform their duties, and when there is a trouble, they pull strings and cover up for each other

       The second statement is that even though the Seismological Bureau already predicted that there will be an earthquake, they don’t want to let the public know there is probably an earthquake going to happen. The reason the Seismological Bureau is keeping it as a secret is that they cannot hundred percent sure that the earthquake will happen, in this case, if they let the people that live in that area leave before the earthquake happens, some government officials would take the responsibility of loss of production and no one is willing to do that. One of the Chinese professional point out that if the earthquake does not happen, and people has already leave that place, it would create a loss of economic that may equal to the loss when the real earthquake happens. Also, as a developing country, in order to bring up the GDP, the Chinese government will not let a thing like this happen. In 1976, there was a really serious earthquake in Tangshan, which led to over hundreds of thousands death. However, there was a small county in tangshang where people only one out of 40 hundred of thousand people was dead and there was 0.2 million houses get destroyed. So what happened on that small county? The evidence shows that before the earthquake, a government official from this small town had attend a conference of the Seismological Bureau, and he received some information about that there may be an earthquake in the area, so he went back to the county and let the public leave the area before the earthquake. However, other county from the Tangshan city did not receive an announcement from the Seismological Bureau about the earthquake, and they did not even know there might be an earthquake which led many people dies in that earthquake.

       The third point is that some Chinese businessmen bribe the government officials in order to use the cheap materials to rebuild the homes after the earthquake happened. Those cheap materials are often time not reliable and not even good for using to build houses. The most intolerable thing is that they use those materials to rebuild the school, and the government officials from the bureau of education help them to do that because they can get a lot of money from businessmen. Just think about this, an adult like us cannot really well protect ourselves in an earthquake, so how can those kids protect themselves if the schools get destroyed. There is a kid who is just about 10 years old, someone saved him in the first earthquake; however, he was killed by a destroyed building in the second earthquake.

 

       There are some people who think the government really did a good job saying that after the earthquake happened, the government sent the army to the area immediately to help those homeless people. However, in my opinion, I think the government is doing this just to make up the mistake. So, in conclusion, I think this is not about whether government can predict the earthquake or not, it is more about whether they treat people’s lives as priorities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE_VYRJzCY0