LOSSES THROUGH EARTHQUAKES

Press, Volume LXXXVIII, Issue 26887, 13 November 1952, Page 8

LOSSES THROUGH EARTHQUAKES

Poor Building Held To Blame

OPINION OF U.S.

EXPERT

The huge losses which befell property owners after earthquakes were attributable to poor structural designing rather than to the earthquakes themselves, said Mr H. JBrunnier, of San Francisco, in an interview in Christchurch yesterday. Mr Brunnier is a noted structural engineer who has specialised in designing buildings to resist earthquakes. “It is the same answer every time: well-designed buildings stand through earthquakes as a monument to gobd engineering,” he said. After the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. Mr Brunnier was called from New York to study the effect of the earthquake on buildings. By the time he arrived, fire had ravaged the city, but from photographs taken immediately after the earthquake, he was able to gather much information which helped him to reach valuable conclusions. . , Since then, he has been invited to advise governments of many countries which have been badly devastated by earthquakes. The last work he did of this kind was in Ecuador in 1949. There he developed a building code for the Government, and on his recommendation, several cities were removed from their former sites. One of these cities had been originally built on a fault line, and another had been so badly shaken that it would have cost more to remove the debris than it did to rebuild the city on another site.

Consultant for Oakland Bridge Mr Brunnier was a consulting engineer for the building of the San Francisco-Oakland bridge in 1931. an undertaking which cost 77,000.000 dollars. “But that was in the days when dollars were dollars, and the job could not be done for twice as much today,” he said. As president of Rotary International, Mr Brunnier has little time for other activities today, but he still takes an active interest in highway construction and finance. He is a former president of the American Automobile Association and is £ member of its board of directors. In his own State, he is chairman of the highways committee of the California State Automobile Association, of which he has been a member for 34 years. “Though taxes are high in the United States for the motorist, they would be much worse if it had not been for the continual fight put up by the automobile associations against the various Governments,” he said. “We have also influenced legislation by supplying factual data to assist the nation’s legislators in bringing down bills.”

“Automobile a Necessity” “The automobile is a necessity, not a luxury, in the United States today, ’ he said. “With improved means of transport, communities have sprung up all over the country, for as soon as a man can afford to buy a car, he leaves the town to live in a suburb. Factories provided enormous parking places for workers’ cars, and in the State of California, which had a population' of about 9.000,000 people, there were 5.000,000 cars, Mr Brunnier said. This average of two persons to one car was the highest such ratio in the world. At lowa State College. Mr Brunnier played representative baseball as a pitcher, and later became a semiprofessional. “I made more monev playing baseball as a semi-professional than I did at the office, but I resisted the temptation to become a professional because I had set my heart on being an engineer,” he said. . When he was over 40, Mr Brunnier took up golf, and reduced his handicap to seven before he retired from the game. Now, at 70, he is fit and upright and proud of the fact that he has not smoked a cigarette since Before coming to New Zealand Mr Brunnier attended Rotary conferences in Zurich and Paris. He flew home to cast his vote in the American Presidential election last week, and then set off by'plane for New Zealand.