Okay, I don't believe the death toll would be as high anywhere in the US, because we design our roadways & buildings to a higher standard of safety than almost anywhere else in the world (I'm a civil engineer, so I'm not just pulling this out of my hat - or anywhere else
). To us, it's more important to minimize the likelihood of loss of life than to save money on building costs - to a point. Once you've decided what level of risk you're willing to accept, you try to design based on that - if you can't meet the standards with the budget you've got, it won't get built. That's not really true in Turkey - from the examples I've seen of Turkey (and many, many other countries), life is not held in as high an esteem as it is here, so safety standards are lower, if they really exist at all.
I think an extra 20% in building costs would seem cheap if you or someone you loved were in a cheaply constructed building during a quake. If companies can't handle the price of building in an earthquake zone, there are other places to build in the US. After all, business is about money, so businesses will go where it is most profitible to be. It's all a matter of priorities - money and lives & how much weight you put on each.
BTW, studies in Japan have shown that very tall buildings are LESS sensitive to quakes. Skyscrapers suffered a few broken windows, while the 10 story buildings around them collapsed. It seems that the tall buildings with a sturdy steel infrastructure dampen the vibration by allowing the shock waves to lengthen as they progress up the building, creating less overall stress in the structure. The shorter buildings can't flex enough to dampen the vibrations, so they collapse.
I noticed a lot of 5-10 story apartment buildings collapsed in Turkey...
I know it may come as a shock to you (that's sarcasm, there), but contractors & subs taking shortcuts is very common in the construction industry - at least I know it is here, I doubt it's any different in Turkey, but here we design for the variances, and our codes are stricter, too. Also, the very nature of construction means that every building/structure is unique, as are the conditions they are built under. In other words, every building, bridge, road, dam, etc. is a one-of-a-kind prototype, so the FOS (Factor of Safety) has to be high (think about that next time you go over a drawbridge or overpass - it's just a prototype).
And yes, there probably will be another "big one" out west. When, no one can tell you. 200 yrs. is nothing in geological time, so if you're expecting to be able to mark your calender and plan for it, fahgitaboutit. Nobody believed that Mt. St. Helens was gonna blow, either - that only happens in foreign countries, right? Right, just like Canadians are safe from gun violence because only American criminals have those things...
One of my college professors had a saying posted on his door. It went something like this:
Structural Engineering is the art and science of designing structures out of materials whose properties we cannot precisely know to withstand forces we cannot possibly predict, all in such a way that the general public remains unaware of our ignorance.
