Deaths related to housing in 1999 Chi-Chi, Taiwan, earthquake

The descriptive study attempts to find house factors associated with earthquake deaths due to the earthquake that struck central Taiwan. Isoseismic area was selected for study to compare building damage and mortality. The rate of houses collapsing increased with intensity of earthquake, inferior constructing, and construction time. According to the ranking by mortality and statistics of death toll in various houses, the poor seismic resistant capacity of mud-brick residence is found to be the major factor that caused great loss of lives. There is 47.6% of the deaths occurred in mud-brick houses though present only 3.8% of all houses. While the reinforced steel concrete buildings had very low damage rate in the major earthquake. Asphyxia and internal hemorrhage were the major cause of deaths in house collapses. These results suggest that improvements in anti-seismic constructing and rescue team efforts could decrease the effect of disaster. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.