2016 august 24th Italian earthquake

In 2009 a 6.3-magnitude earthquake in the Aquila region, which was also felt in the Italian capital 117 km away, the earthquake left more than 300 dead now in 2016 another 6.2 earthquakes has struck and the death toll is above 290 and is expected to increase.

An earthquake, measuring 6.2 on the richter scale hit italy on the 24th of august at 3:36 in the morning the initial shock was 6.2 and had a hypocenter that was 10 km deep giving the earthquake a shallow earthquake title and causing it to be more destructive as the rock has less effect on reducing the lateral and vertical shaking(this is also known as newton's inverse square law which states that as the distance doubles energy will decrease by a factor of 4) of the Adria micro-plate being subducted under the Eurasia two plate.

The earthquake claimed a total of around 159 deaths within the first few days however an accurate amount of fatalities is hard to find and could be up to 300 and above, the earthquake was followed by around 2500 aftershocks in the following weeks that passed, on the 24th there were 8 aftershocks that all measured above 4.0 of the Richter scale, at 4:33 the second largest an aftershock occurred which measured a 5.5 on the Richter scale.

One of the reasons for the large amounts of deaths was the fact that the earthquake stuck in the middle of the night, therefore, most people were unable to escape from their houses as the earthquake shook the ground, earthquakes don't kill people falling buildings do, which brings me on the second reason why so many people died in a country which is meant to be a HIC and also experience around 20 earthquakes a day however most of these are so small that on seismographs can detect them, the buildings in the two mainly affected areas Amatrice (population density of 15 per KM squared) and Accumoli, about 117 km northeast of Rome were old and poorly constructed and therefore gave way as their foundation were shook.

The earthquake Mercalli scale has not been released yet however if we look as previous earthquakes and also look at the 12 points on the Mercalli scale we can give an educated answer to what it is meant to be.

Using the Mercalli scale I estimate that the earthquake was around a 7-8

Other key things to note with this natural disaster are:

• 50 million was released by the government to help provide for the cost of the search and rescue
• 12 helicopter was dispatched to help with the rescue, with such destruction ground-based vehicles would be unsuitable to help with the search
• 80% of buildings were destroyed in both villages
• 120 roads were blocked or destroyed

How does this compare to other 6.2 magnitude earthquakes?

The 1984 Otaki earthquake hit Nagano Prefecture, Japan on September 14, 1984, at 08:48 local time killing 29 people.

• Hypocenter of 3km deep
• 29 dead
• Huge landslides
• Low population density similar to Amatrice