80 Seconds

I recently saw an ad about an “earthquake bed” - a high-tech bed whose bedframe is actually a sturdy metal box. It has built-in sensors so that, if it detects an earthquake, it quickly drops you into the box and seals shut, protecting you from any falling debris.

There are actually two series of earthquake beds - one from Chinese inventor Wang Wenxi, and one from Russian company Dahir Insaat. Some of their iterations include built-in safety gear - food, oxygen, a fire extinguisher, etc. - to keep you safe while awaiting rescue. I can’t find the specific ad that I saw, but this CNN video shares Dahir Insaat’s concept video:

Neither creator’s bed appears to be commercially available; however, based on their specialized construction, limited development, heavy steel, and complex safety-critical devices, I’m guessing they’d cost tens of thousands of dollars if they could be purchased.

I’m sure that the ad I saw was making the rounds because of February 6’s earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. I don’t begrudge the ad or the inventions - I’m not sure how workable they are, but the goal of saving lives is commendable, and invention and research involves pursuing ideas that may or may not pan out, and trying to implement an expensive, impractical idea is often the first step toward making something cheaper and practical.

And yet there’s something so… human… about responding to tragedy by offering safety through technology, if only you can afford it.

My own response to the earthquakes is a bit closer to this song by Kimya Dawson, written in response to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake tsunami. (Warning: sensitive content.)

The earthquakes lasted 80 seconds. Over 50,000 people were killed. Since February 6, 9,000 aftershocks have been reported. Over 170,000 buildings - some of them centuries old - have been destroyed or severely damaged. Millions of people have been affected. As of Saturday, nearly 240,000 rescue workers continue to dig through the rubble, looking for victims, so they can at least give them a proper burial.

What’s an earthquake bed supposed to accomplish? Tens of thousands of dollars, times tens of thousands of people, just to be buried for weeks in the rubble of what used to be your home?

We’re quite good at controlling our environment and protecting against misfortune. Insurance, vaccinations, the Federal Reserve, building codes, sprinkler systems, irrigation, deep freezers, weather radar, floodwalls, and - yes - earthquake beds, to protect against disease, economic loss, famine, drought, fire, flood, storm. But 80 seconds shows the limits of our power.

What can we do? We call earthquakes “acts of God,” and there are rich resources within the Christian faith for developing our understanding of when and how God acts, why God allows these things to happen, and how we should respond. (“Those 50,000 who were killed when the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria fell on them, do you think they were worse offenders than all the others who live in the world? No, I tell you! But unless you repent you will all perish as well!”) But so much of the tragedy is human. From The Dispatch:

In 1999 an earthquake in western Turkey killed more than 17,000, setting off a nationwide push to demolish old construction and rebuild earthquake resistant buildings. Except many pre-1999 buildings in the poorer south remained, and many new buildings weren’t built to withstand the tremor.

[Turkish President] Erdoğan’s political rivals say shoddy new construction—encouraged by the president and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)—is in part to blame for the disaster. A recently resurfaced video from 2019 shows Erdoğan touting new construction in Kahramanmaraş following the passage of a law allowing contractors to pay a fee to spare their unlicensed buildings from demolition. “We solved the problem of 144,156 citizens of Maraş with zoning amnesty,” he said of the housing projects, some of which were destroyed in the quakes.

And some are blaming the Turkish government for playing politics:

In [Erdoğan’s] first public remarks [after the quakes], he threatened legal action against those who criticized the government… The day after the disaster, Erdoğan blocked access to Twitter, where criticism of the government was proliferating. Rescue workers quickly condemned that decision, because victims trapped under the rubble were using social media to communicate their locations to rescue teams… Demolition crews have been dispatched to destroy public records office buildings that housed building permits, along with the names and records of contractors and the public officials who approved such projects… Various aid workers also told press outlets they were pushed out of the way just as victims were being brought out of collapsed buildings, then replaced by government-affiliated aid workers who wanted to take the credit for the rescue in front of television cameras.

In Syria, the disaster has been complicated by the decade-long civil war, with the White Helmets, a volunteer group that operates in opposition-held Syrian territory, shouldering much of the burden of the rescue work.

There, too, leaders are choosing to play politics:

The United States Treasury announced a six-month freeze on sanctions against the Syrian government involving “all transactions related to earthquake relief.” Though U.S. officials insisted none of their existing penalties on Damascus targeted humanitarian aid shipments, the move followed finger-pointing from [Syrian dictator Assad’s] regime officials who wasted no time in blaming Western sanctions for their own deficient response to the catastrophe…

While his government complained about sanctions, the dictator of more than two decades has been stalling the delivery of life-saving relief for political gain. Until last week, the regime had insisted that all international assistance be routed through the Damascus government, delaying aid shipments to some of the hardest-hit areas in the country’s rebel-held northwest.

80 seconds would be devastating under any circumstances. But it’s made so much worse when profit-seeking or short-sighted politics leave infrastructure unprepared; when tyranny and war decimate a region for a decade; when protecting yourself becomes more important than open, honest information; when aid becomes a tool in bolstering someone’s political position.

Human response, therefore, becomes important: people who are willing to build strong communities and social ties that can be ready to bear the weight when disaster hits. People who help out, who volunteer their time and donate their money, even at personal risk and sacrifice. (Over two hundred White Helmets have died performing their duties over the last ten years.) People and countries who send aid rather than put their own country first, who seek to protect the poor and powerless.

Last year, singer-songwriter Nick Cave wrote,

We must love each other. And mostly I think we do – or we live in very close proximity to the idea, because there is barely any distance between a feeling of neutrality toward the world and a crucial love for it, barely any distance at all. All that is required to move from indifference to love is to have our hearts broken. The heart breaks and the world explodes in front of us as a revelation.

There is no problem of evil. There is only a problem of good. Why does a world that is so often cruel, insist on being beautiful, of being good? Why does it take a devastation for the world to reveal its true spiritual nature? I don’t know the answer to this, but I do know there exists a kind of potentiality just beyond trauma.