Unreinforced Masonry Buildings in Earthquakes

Looking at pictures from the Christchurch Earthquake, I was struck by the number of brick buildings.

Searching on the internet, I found this interesting article, written after the September 2010 Christchurch earthquake:

Some of New Zealand’s older buildings need to be knocked down before another quake does it for us, says Euan Smith Professor of Geophysics at Victoria University’s Institute of Geophysics - and more so because a bigger jolt could be on the way (keep reading).

Professor Smith said the country needed to learn several lessons from the Saturday’s earthquake in Christchurch.

The first lesson, for local authorities and policy makers, concerns what happened to the unreinforced masonry (URM) structures in this earthquake, Professor Smith told the Science Media Centre.