The 7.7 magnitude earthquake that struck Myanmar Friday and could leave a death toll over 1,000 further underscores a regional lag in building codes and construction standards, according to Daniel Aldrich, a Northeastern professor, director of the university’s Resilience Studies Program and co-director at the Global Resilience Institute. “A lot of factors are converging here,” he says. “But the bottom line is we’re talking about construction standards in developing countries.”
He continues: “With the more than 150 people reported dead so far, and potentially maybe thousands more, there is strong support for the argument that governance structures — the way a central government spends money, supports construction laws and builds a system that double-checks developers — plays an outsized role in these disasters.”
