Building better can reduce catastrophic quake deaths

Thanks to the planet’s exploding population, more than a billion housing units will be built during the next half century. Many of those will be in urban areas that are vulnerable to catastrophic earthquakes such as the magnitude-7 quake that killed more than 200,000 people in Haiti in January. Roger Bilham, a seismologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies the earthquake vulnerability of cities, sat down recently with Science News contributing editor Alexandra Witze to talk about why builders routinely flout earthquake-engineering regulations, and how urban residents can be kept safe.