Engineering Explains Why the November 26 earthquake was devastating

Many homes and buildings have been destroyed, while others have suffered considerable damage and threatened collapse.

Engineer Arben Meche, invited to the Ora News interview space, explained the causes of catastrophic injuries in Durres, which result from earthquake movements in the horizontal direction.

At this moment the palace seems to be above a spring. The movement is vertical and the wave of the earthquake comes from the bottom-up. If you look carefully at the moving palace, in different places it moves differently because on a part of the earth the shock wave comes in different ways, somewhere it sits while it rises. This move is called axrogram. This has vertical movements because it's under pressure from the vertical earthquake, which is not just because there is a horizontal earthquake. For the sake of truth, the deeper the temperature is, the more you face the vertical earthquake. This time it was horizontal, and it caused all objects to undergo this movement in Durres. The vertical movement is more noisy because there are items that sit and fall while the horizontal movement is more catastrophic. The landscape works on building flexibility. Columns can keep pressure from above as they don't hold on to the fold. When it is vertical, the earthquake loads the column from above as the horizontal bends it. We have the expectation of destruction at the horizontal blow. That's the kind of estimate that destroys, even if you see all of Durres, which has all of those defects, they have them from horizontal stroke”, Mace said.

It makes a difference between two types of earthquake movement and stresses that horizontal is more destructive.

The structures of the buildings in Durres are not technically well-built so it classifies all those that have suffered injuries as uninhabitable.

Engineer Mece calls on the citizens of Durres to leave their homes if the buildings are damaged, even partially.