Damage
The high loss of life caused by the earthquake can be attributed to the time it struck and how suddenly it struck, as well as to the quality and nature of building construction in China. The earthquake lacked the foreshocks that sometimes come with earthquakes of this magnitude. It also struck at just before 4 AM, when most people were asleep and unprepared. Tangshan itself was thought to be in a region with a relatively low risk of earthquakes. Very few buildings had been built to withstand an earthquake, and the city lies on unstable alluvial soil. Therefore, hundreds of thousands of buildings were destroyed.
The earthquake devastated the city over an area of roughly 6.5 kilometres (4.0 mi) by 8 kilometres (5.0 mi). Many of the people who survived the initial earthquake were trapped under collapsed buildings. Tremors were felt as far away as Xi'an approximately 760 km(470 mi) away. Eighty-five percent of the buildings in the city were collapsed into ruins or became uninhabitable. The seismic waves spread far, with damage in cities such as Qinhuangdao and Tianjin, and a few buildings as far away as Beijing, 140 km from the epicenter, were damaged. The economic loss totaled to 10 billion yuan.
Read more about this topic: 1976 Tangshan Earthquake
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