Lower Ninth Ward
Lower Ninth Ward is a neighborhood of the U. S. city of New Orleans, Louisiana. As the name implies, it is part of the 9th Ward of New Orleans; the Lower Ninth Ward is thought of as the entire area within New Orleans downriver of the Industrial Canal. The term "Lower" refers to its location farther towards the mouth of the Mississippi River, downriver, "down" or "below" the rest of the city; the 9th Ward, like all wards of New Orleans, is a voting district. The 9th Ward was added as a voting district in 1852; the Lower 9th Ward is composed of Ward 9 Districts 1, 2, 4, 7 which make up the Holy Cross Area and Ward 9 Districts 3, 5, 6, 8. Higher voting district numbers in the 9th Ward are on the upriver side of the Industrial Canal; the area came to international attention for its devastation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Excluding the industrial and swamp areas north of the Florida Canal, the neighborhood of the Lower 9th Ward is about 1.25 mi from east to west and 2 mi from north to south.
Three major avenues cross the developed portion of the neighborhood, each with bridges over the Industrial Canal. Closest to the River is St. Claude Avenue. Most major businesses serving the neighborhood are located on St. Claude or Claiborne, although a smattering of additional neighborhood business is located throughout the area. While the first two of these three avenues continue into St. Bernard Parish. Viavant/Venetian Isles St. Bernard Parish Holy Cross Bywater The City Planning Commission defines the boundaries of Lower Ninth Ward as these streets: Florida Avenue, St. Bernard Parish, St. Claude Avenue and the Industrial Canal; the Lower Ninth Ward is commonly used to describe a larger area. This area borders the Mississippi River to the St. Bernard Parish to the east. To the west is the Industrial Canal, across, the Bywater section of New Orleans; the northern or inland boundary is given as the Florida Canal with Florida Avenue, a levee, railroad tracks running beside it. Alternatively, the industrial area north of Florida Avenue is sometimes included as part of the Lower 9th Ward, extending the boundary to the southern edge of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway.
In Louisiana's colonial era, this area was developed as sugar cane plantations, with narrow tracts extending back from river frontage that provided the transportation and shipping routes. At the start of the 19th century, the portion closer to the river was developed for residential use, at the same time as the Bywater area. In 1834 the United States Army established the Jackson Barracks here; as late as the 1870s, the area behind Saint Claude Avenue was still small farms with scattered residences. The area on the "woods" side of Claiborne was undeveloped cypress swamp. What became the Lower 9th Ward did not become distinct from the upriver parts of the 9th Ward until the start of the 1920s, when the Industrial Canal was dredged; this development bisected the 9th Ward. At this time, people started referring to the area "above" from the Canal as the "Upper" 9th Ward, this area as the "Lower." The section on the River side of St. Claude Aveune, which developed as an urban area first, is sometimes called the "Holy Cross Neighborhood" for Holy Cross High School, the large Catholic school.
For many years, it attracted students from throughout the city. Construction of the Industrial Canal led to development of the land farther back along the Canal; as shipping became containerized in the 20th century, demand for labor declined, with negative economic consequences for the neighborhood. Some people left to find work in other areas. In 1965, Hurricane Betsy struck New Orleans. A levee on the Industrial Canal collapsed, much of the Lower 9th Ward was flooded. President Lyndon B. Johnson visited the devastated flooded area shortly after the storm, ordered aid for the storm victims. At the end of August 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall just east of New Orleans, the fifth deadliest hurricane and the costliest natural disaster in the history of the United States. Multiple breaches in the levees of at least four canals resulted in catastrophic flooding in a majority of the city. Nowhere in the city was the devastation greater than in the Lower 9th Ward the portion from Claiborne Avenue back.
This was due to the storm surge generated in the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a deep-draft shipping channel built by the Army Corps of Engineers in the late 1950s. The construction destroyed tens of thousands of acres of protective coastal wetlands that once acted as a storm surge buffer for the community. Storm surge flood waters appear to have poured into the Lower Ninth Ward from at least three sources. To the east, water flowed in from Saint Bernard Parish, while to the west the Industrial Canal suffered two major breaches: one a block in from Florida Avenue, the second back from Claiborne Avenue; the force of the water smashed or knocked many off their foundations. A large barge, the ING 4727, was swept by flood waters into the neighborhood through the breach near Claiborne Avenue, leveling homes beneath it; the storm surge was so great that t
New Orleans
New Orleans is a consolidated city-parish located along the Mississippi River in the southeastern region of the U. S. state of Louisiana. With an estimated population of 393,292 in 2017, it is the most populous city in Louisiana. A major port, New Orleans is considered an economic and commercial hub for the broader Gulf Coast region of the United States. New Orleans is world-renowned for its distinct music, Creole cuisine, unique dialect, its annual celebrations and festivals, most notably Mardi Gras; the historic heart of the city is the French Quarter, known for its French and Spanish Creole architecture and vibrant nightlife along Bourbon Street. The city has been described as the "most unique" in the United States, owing in large part to its cross-cultural and multilingual heritage. Founded in 1718 by French colonists, New Orleans was once the territorial capital of French Louisiana before being traded to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. New Orleans in 1840 was the third-most populous city in the United States, it was the largest city in the American South from the Antebellum era until after World War II.
The city's location and flat elevation have made it vulnerable to flooding. State and federal authorities have installed a complex system of levees and drainage pumps in an effort to protect the city. New Orleans was affected by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which resulted in flooding more than 80% of the city, thousands of deaths, so much displacement because of damaged communities and lost housing as to cause a population decline of over 50%. Since Katrina, major redevelopment efforts have led to a rebound in the city's population. Concerns about gentrification, new residents buying property in closely knit communities, displacement of longtime residents have been expressed; the city and Orleans Parish are coterminous. As of 2017, Orleans Parish is the third most-populous parish in Louisiana, behind East Baton Rouge Parish and neighboring Jefferson Parish; the city and parish are bounded by St. Tammany Parish and Lake Pontchartrain to the north, St. Bernard Parish and Lake Borgne to the east, Plaquemines Parish to the south, Jefferson Parish to the south and west.
The city anchors the larger New Orleans metropolitan area, which had an estimated population of 1,275,762 in 2017. It is the most populous metropolitan area in Louisiana and the 46th-most populated MSA in the United States; the city is named after the Duke of Orleans, who reigned as Regent for Louis XV from 1715 to 1723. It has many illustrative nicknames: Crescent City alludes to the course of the Lower Mississippi River around and through the city; the Big Easy was a reference by musicians in the early 20th century to the relative ease of finding work there. It may have originated in the Prohibition era, when the city was considered one big speakeasy due to the government's inability to control alcohol sales, in open violation of the 18th Amendment; the City that Care Forgot has been used since at least 1938, refers to the outwardly easy-going, carefree nature of the residents. La Nouvelle-Orléans was founded in the Spring of 1718 by the French Mississippi Company, under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, on land inhabited by the Chitimacha.
It was named for Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, Regent of the Kingdom of France at the time. His title came from the French city of Orléans; the French colony was ceded to the Spanish Empire in the Treaty of Paris, following France's defeat by Great Britain in the Seven Years' War. During the American Revolutionary War, New Orleans was an important port for smuggling aid to the rebels, transporting military equipment and supplies up the Mississippi River. Beginning in the 1760s, Filipinos began to settle around New Orleans. Bernardo de Gálvez y Madrid, Count of Gálvez launched a southern campaign against the British from the city in 1779. Nueva Orleans remained under Spanish control until 1803, when it reverted to French rule. Nearly all of the surviving 18th-century architecture of the Vieux Carré dates from the Spanish period, notably excepting the Old Ursuline Convent. Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Thereafter, the city grew with influxes of Americans, French and Africans.
Immigrants were Irish, Germans and Italians. Major commodity crops of sugar and cotton were cultivated with slave labor on nearby large plantations. Thousands of refugees from the 1804 Haitian Revolution, both whites and free people of color, arrived in New Orleans. While Governor Claiborne and other officials wanted to keep out additional free black people, the French Creoles wanted to increase the French-speaking population; as more refugees were allowed into the Territory of Orleans, Haitian émigrés who had first gone to Cuba arrived. Many of the white Francophones had been deported by officials in Cuba in retaliation for Bonapartist schemes. Nearly 90 percent of these immigrants settled in New Orleans; the 1809 migration brought 2,731 whites, 3,102 free people of color, 3,226 slaves of African descent, doubling the city's population. The city became a greater proportion than Charleston, South Carolina's 53 percent. During the final campaign of the War of 1812, the British sent a force of 11,000 in a
New Dimension programme
The New Dimension programme, sometimes referred to as the New Dimension or New Dimensions, was started by the Department for Communities and Local Government in the UK, for fire and rescue services in England and Wales, following the 2001 terror attacks. It has provided equipment and standardised procedures to deal with terrorist attacks and major environmental disasters. By July 2004, the New Dimensions programme had provided £56m to various projects, a further £132m was promised for the period up to 2007, it operates at a national and local level, while it does not apply to Scotland, a Fire and Rescue Service circular, published in 2007 noted that: "Officials in the Welsh Assembly Government and the Scottish Executive agree in principle that the general terms of the Mutual Aid Protocol should apply ‘cross-border’ between Scotland, England." New Dimension provides a co-ordinated approach across the emergency services, local authority emergency planners and it has been supported and promoted by the Chief Fire Officers Association.
In 2015, the Conservative Government announced that a third of the vehicles allocated to the programme were to be withdrawn in 2016 New Dimension is part of CLG's fire resilience programme, which includes the FireLink and FiReControl projects. It has delivered a range of equipment to the FRS to assist with handling large-scale incidents; the vehicles supplied as part of the New Dimension provision will be fitted with the new FireLink digital radios, which will provide the foundations of a single wide area communications system in England and Scotland. The purpose of New Dimension is to provide information and guidance for fire and rescue services on emergency response to the following specific types of incident: Terrorist CBRN threats Chemical, biological and nuclear incidents Industrial and domestic accidents Chemical spills and collapsed buildings Natural disasters Floods and earthquakesThe onus is on fire services to provide "New Dimension capability", legislation for England, passed in April 2007, recognised a fire and rescue service's responsibilities for dealing with the above types of incident.
The Fire and Rescue Services Order 2007 is a statutory instrument which requires that fire services make provision for dealing with CBRN incidents and structural collapse. Money from New Dimension has been used to provide fire services with new specialist Urban Search and Rescue appliances and equipment. Fire services were not equipped to deal with largescale USAR incidents. Vehicles part of New Dimension Incident Response Unit Detection, Monitoring Prime Mover Urban Search and Rescue High Volume Pump Fire service in the United Kingdom Dept for Communities and Local Government: Introduction to the New Dimensions programme Pictures of USAR equipment from the DfCLG
Law enforcement agency
A law enforcement agency, in North American English, is a government agency responsible for the enforcement of the laws. Outside North America, such organizations are called police services. In North America, some of these services are called police, others are known as sheriff's offices/departments, while investigative police services in the United States are called bureaus, for example the Federal Bureau of Investigation. LEAs which have their ability to apply their powers restricted in some way are said to operate within a jurisdiction. LEAs will have some form of geographic restriction on their ability to apply their powers; the LEA might be able to apply its powers within a country, for example the United States of America's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Explosives or its Drug Enforcement Administration, within a division of a country, for example the Australian state Queensland Police, or across a collection of countries, for example international organizations such as Interpol, or the European Union's Europol.
LEAs which operate across a collection of countries tend to assist in law enforcement activities, rather than directly enforcing laws, by facilitating the sharing of information necessary for law enforcement between LEAs within those countries, for example Europol has no executive powers. Sometimes a LEA’s jurisdiction is determined by the complexity or seriousness of the non compliance with a law; some countries determine the jurisdiction in these circumstances by means of policy and resource allocation between agencies, for example in Australia, the Australian Federal Police take on complex serious matters referred to it by an agency and the agency will undertake its own investigations of less serious or complex matters by consensus, while other countries have laws which decide the jurisdiction, for example in the United States of America some matters are required by law to be referred to other agencies if they are of a certain level of seriousness or complexity, for example cross state boundary kidnapping in the United States is escalated to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Differentiation of jurisdiction based on the seriousness and complexity of the non compliance either by law or by policy and consensus can coexist in countries. A LEA which has a wide range of powers but whose ability is restricted geographically to an area, only part of a country, is referred to as local police or territorial police. Other LEAs have a jurisdiction defined by the type of laws they assist in enforcing. For example, Interpol does not work with political, religious, or racial matters. A LEA’s jurisdiction also includes the governing bodies they support, the LEA itself. Jurisdictionally, there can be an important difference between international LEAs and multinational LEAs though both are referred to as "international" in official documents. An international law enforcement agency has jurisdiction and or operates in multiple countries and across State borders, for example Interpol. A multinational law enforcement agency will operate in only one country, or one division of a country, but is made up of personnel from several countries, for example the European Union Police Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
International LEAs are also multinational, for example Interpol, but multinational LEAs are not international. Within a country, the jurisdiction of law enforcement agencies can be organized and structured in a number of ways to provide law enforcement throughout the country. A law enforcement agency’s jurisdiction can be for the whole country or for a division or sub-division within the country. LEA jurisdiction for a division within a country can be at more than one level, for example at the division level, state, province, or territory level, for example at the sub division level, county, shire, or municipality or metropolitan area level. In Australia for example, each state has its own LEAs. In the United States for example each state and county or city has its own LEAs; as a result, because both Australia and the United States are federations and have federal LEAs, Australia has two levels of law enforcement and the United States has multiple levels of law enforcement, Tribal, County, Town, special Jurisdiction and others.
A LEA’s jurisdiction will be geographically divided into operations areas for administrative and logistical efficiency reasons. An operations area is called a command or an office. While the operations area of a LEA is sometimes referred to as a jurisdiction, any LEA operations area still has legal jurisdiction in all geographic areas the LEA operates, but by policy and consensus the operations area does not operate in other geographical operations areas of the LEA. For example, the United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police is divided into 32 Borough Operational Command Units, based on the London boroughs, the New York City Police Department is divided into 77 precincts. Sometimes the one legal jurisdiction is covered by more than one LEA, again for administrative and logistical efficiency reasons, or arising from policy, or historical reasons. For example, the area of jurisdiction of English and Welsh law is covered by a number of LEAs called constabularies, each of which has legal jurisdiction over the whole area covered by English and Welsh law, but they do not operate out of their areas without formal liaison between them.
The primary difference between separate agencies and operational areas within the one legal jurisdiction is the degree of flexibility to move resources between versus within agencies. When multiple LEAs cover the one legal jurisdiction, each agency still organizes itself into operations
Earthquake
An earthquake is the shaking of the surface of the Earth, resulting from the sudden release of energy in the Earth's lithosphere that creates seismic waves. Earthquakes can range in size from those that are so weak that they cannot be felt to those violent enough to toss people around and destroy whole cities; the seismicity, or seismic activity, of an area is the frequency and size of earthquakes experienced over a period of time. The word tremor is used for non-earthquake seismic rumbling. At the Earth's surface, earthquakes manifest themselves by shaking and displacing or disrupting the ground; when the epicenter of a large earthquake is located offshore, the seabed may be displaced sufficiently to cause a tsunami. Earthquakes can trigger landslides, volcanic activity. In its most general sense, the word earthquake is used to describe any seismic event—whether natural or caused by humans—that generates seismic waves. Earthquakes are caused by rupture of geological faults, but by other events such as volcanic activity, mine blasts, nuclear tests.
An earthquake's point of initial rupture is called its hypocenter. The epicenter is the point at ground level directly above the hypocenter. Tectonic earthquakes occur anywhere in the earth where there is sufficient stored elastic strain energy to drive fracture propagation along a fault plane; the sides of a fault move past each other smoothly and aseismically only if there are no irregularities or asperities along the fault surface that increase the frictional resistance. Most fault surfaces do have such asperities and this leads to a form of stick-slip behavior. Once the fault has locked, continued relative motion between the plates leads to increasing stress and therefore, stored strain energy in the volume around the fault surface; this continues until the stress has risen sufficiently to break through the asperity allowing sliding over the locked portion of the fault, releasing the stored energy. This energy is released as a combination of radiated elastic strain seismic waves, frictional heating of the fault surface, cracking of the rock, thus causing an earthquake.
This process of gradual build-up of strain and stress punctuated by occasional sudden earthquake failure is referred to as the elastic-rebound theory. It is estimated that only 10 percent or less of an earthquake's total energy is radiated as seismic energy. Most of the earthquake's energy is used to power the earthquake fracture growth or is converted into heat generated by friction. Therefore, earthquakes lower the Earth's available elastic potential energy and raise its temperature, though these changes are negligible compared to the conductive and convective flow of heat out from the Earth's deep interior. There are three main types of fault, all of which may cause an interplate earthquake: normal and strike-slip. Normal and reverse faulting are examples of dip-slip, where the displacement along the fault is in the direction of dip and movement on them involves a vertical component. Normal faults occur in areas where the crust is being extended such as a divergent boundary. Reverse faults occur in areas.
Strike-slip faults are steep structures where the two sides of the fault slip horizontally past each other. Many earthquakes are caused by movement on faults that have components of both dip-slip and strike-slip. Reverse faults those along convergent plate boundaries are associated with the most powerful earthquakes, megathrust earthquakes, including all of those of magnitude 8 or more. Strike-slip faults continental transforms, can produce major earthquakes up to about magnitude 8. Earthquakes associated with normal faults are less than magnitude 7. For every unit increase in magnitude, there is a thirtyfold increase in the energy released. For instance, an earthquake of magnitude 6.0 releases 30 times more energy than a 5.0 magnitude earthquake and a 7.0 magnitude earthquake releases 900 times more energy than a 5.0 magnitude of earthquake. An 8.6 magnitude earthquake releases the same amount of energy as 10,000 atomic bombs like those used in World War II. This is so because the energy released in an earthquake, thus its magnitude, is proportional to the area of the fault that ruptures and the stress drop.
Therefore, the longer the length and the wider the width of the faulted area, the larger the resulting magnitude. The topmost, brittle part of the Earth's crust, the cool slabs of the tectonic plates that are descending down into the hot mantle, are the only parts of our planet which can store elastic energy and release it in fault ruptures. Rocks hotter than about 300 °C flow in response to stress; the maximum observed lengths of ruptures and mapped faults are 1,000 km. Examples are the earthquakes in Chile, 1960; the longest earthquake ruptures on strike-slip faults, like the San Andreas Fault, the North Anatolian Fault in Turkey and the Denali Fault in Alaska, are about half to one third as long as the lengths along subducting plate margins, those along normal faults are shorter. The most important parameter controlling the maximum earthquake magnitude on a fault is however not the maximum available length, but the available width because the latter varies by a factor of 20. Along converging plate margins, the dip angle of the rupture plane is shallow about 10 de
Search and rescue dog
The use of dogs in search and rescue is a valuable component in wilderness tracking, natural disasters, mass casualty events, in locating missing people. Dedicated handlers and well-trained dogs are required for the use of dogs to be effective in search efforts. Search and rescue dogs are worked, by a small team on foot. Search and rescue dogs detect human scent. Although the exact processes are still researched, it may include skin rafts, evaporated perspiration, respiratory gases, or decomposition gases released by bacterial action on human skin or tissues. From their training and experience and rescue dogs can be classified broadly as either air-scenting dogs or trailing dogs, they can be classified according to whether they scent discriminate, under what conditions they can work. Scent discriminating dogs have proven their ability to alert only on the scent of an individual person, after being given a sample of that person's scent. Non-scent discriminating dogs alert on or follow any scent of a given type, such as any human scent or any cadaver scent.
SAR dogs can be trained for rubble searches, for water searches, for avalanche searches. Air-scenting dogs use general human scents to home in on subjects, whereas trailing dogs rely on scent of the specific subject. Air-scenting dogs work off-lead, are though not always, non-scent-discriminating, cover large areas of terrain; these dogs are trained to follow diffused or wind-borne scent working perpendicular to the wind to indicate their find. Handler technique, terrain and atmospheric conditions determine the area covered by air-scenting dogs, although a typical search area may be 40–160 acres and scent sources can be detected from a distance of 1/4 mile or more. Although other breeds can be trained for air-scenting, the prototypical air-scenting dog is a herding or sporting breed that has a reputation for working and in coordination with a human handler. Tracking dogs will work on lead and will have their nose to the track following ground disturbance. A good tracking dog will be able to work through a variety of terrain as well as maneuver turns and "double backs" that a subject might take.
A trailing dog is scent specific, can have his/her head up using some of the air scent techniques to find the subject. Trailing dogs will work on lead, trailing dogs will venture off the actual path that a subject took should a scent pool be discovered; this is not to be considered an error by the dog, as they are following a specific scent and working through all other human scents to get to the source. It is a common misconception that only German Shepherd Dogs, Doberman Pinschers and Bloodhounds do this type of work. All dogs are capable of trailing. In addition to these types of dogs, some teams cross train dogs in both trailing and airscenting and use them as scent specific "area searches"; these dogs are worked in an area that an airspace dog would work, but are capable of ignoring other search teams and other people in or near the assigned search area. When deployed this way, these airscenting dogs require a scent article; these dogs train every day and are hard workers. Specific applications for SAR dogs include wilderness, cadaver and drowning search and rescue or recovery.
In wilderness SAR applications, dogs can be deployed to high-probability areas whereas tracking/trailing dogs can be deployed from the subject's last known point or the site of a discovered clue. Handlers must be capable of bush navigation, wilderness survival techniques, be self-sufficient; the dogs must be capable of working for 4–8 hours without distraction. Disaster dogs are used to locate victims of mass-casualty events. Many disaster dogs in the US are trained to meet the Federal Emergency Management Agency K9 standards for domestic or international deployment. Disaster dogs rely on airspace, may be limited in mass-casualty events by their inability to differentiate between survivors and deceased victims. Human remains cadaver dogs are used to locate the remains of deceased victims. Depending on the nature of the search, these dogs may work on-lead. Tracking/trailing dogs are cross-trained as cadaver dogs, although the scent the dog detects is of a different nature than that detected for live or deceased subjects.
Cadaver dogs can locate decomposed bodies, body fragments, or skeletal remains. In t
2008 Sichuan earthquake
The 2008 Sichuan earthquake known as the Great Sichuan earthquake or Wenchuan earthquake, occurred at 14:28:01 China Standard Time on May 12, 2008. Measuring at 8.0 Ms, the earthquake's epicenter was located 80 kilometres west-northwest of Chengdu, the provincial capital, with a focal depth of 19 km. The earthquake ruptured the fault with surface displacements of several meters; the earthquake was felt in nearby countries and as far away as both Beijing and Shanghai—1,500 and 1,700 km away—where office buildings swayed with the tremor. Strong aftershocks, some exceeding 6 Ms, continued to hit the area up to several months after the main shock, causing further casualties and damage; the earthquake caused the largest number of geohazards recorded, including about 200,000 landslides and more than 800 quake lakes distributed over an area of 110,000 km2. Over 69,000 people lost their lives including 68,636 in Sichuan province. 374,176 were reported injured, with 18,222 listed as missing as of July 2008.
The geohazards triggered by the earthquake are thought to be responsible for at least one third of the death toll. The earthquake left about 4.8 million people homeless, though the number could be as high as 11 million. 15 million people lived in the affected area. It was the deadliest earthquake to hit China since the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, which killed at least 240,000 people, the strongest in the country since the 1950 Chayu earthquake, which registered at 8.5 on the Richter magnitude scale. It is the 18th deadliest earthquake of all time. On November 6, 2008, the central government announced that it would spend 1 trillion RMB over the next three years to rebuild areas ravaged by the earthquake, as part of the Chinese economic stimulus program. According to a study by the China Earthquake Administration, the earthquake occurred along the Longmenshan Fault, a thrust structure along the border of the Indo-Australian Plate and Eurasian Plate. Seismic activities concentrated on its mid-fracture.
The rupture lasted close to 120 seconds, with the majority of energy released in the first 80 seconds. Starting from Wenchuan, the rupture propagated at an average speed of 3.1 km/s, 49° toward north east, rupturing a total of about 300 km. Maximum displacement amounted to nine metres; the focus was deeper than 10 km. In a United States Geological Survey study, preliminary rupture models of the earthquake indicated displacement of up to nine metres along a fault 240 km long by 20 km deep; the earthquake generated deformations of the surface greater than three metres and increased the stress at the northeastern and southwestern ends of the fault. On May 20, USGS seismologist Tom Parsons warned that there is "high risk" of a major M>7 aftershock over the next weeks or months. Japanese seismologist Yuji Yagi at the University of Tsukuba said that the earthquake occurred in two stages: "The 250-kilometre Longmenshan Fault tore in two sections, the first one ripping about 6.5 metres followed by a second one that sheared 3.5 metres."
His data showed that the earthquake lasted about two minutes and released 30 times the energy of the Great Hanshin earthquake of 1995 in Japan, which killed over 6,000 people. He pointed out that the shallowness of the epicenter and the density of population increased the severity of the earthquake. Teruyuki Kato, a seismologist at the University of Tokyo, said that the seismic waves of the quake traveled a long distance without losing their power because of the firmness of the terrain in central China. According to reports from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, the earthquake tremors lasted for "about two or three minutes"; the extent of the earthquake and after shock-affected areas lying north-east, along the Longmen Shan fault. The Longmen Shan Fault System is situated in the eastern border of the Tibetan Plateau and contains several faults; this earthquake ruptured at least two imbricate structures in Longmen Shan Fault System, i.e. the Beichuan Fault and the Guanxian–Anxian Fault.
In the epicentral area, the average slip in Beichuan Fault was about 3.5 metres vertical, 3.5 metres horizontal-parallel to the fault, 4.8 metres horizontal-perpendicular to the fault. In the area about 30 kilometres northeast of the epicenter, the surface slip on Beichuan Fault was purely dextral strike-slip up to about three metres, while the average slip in Guanxian–Anxian Fault was about two metres vertical and 2.3 metres horizontal. According to CEA: "The energy source of the Wenchuan earthquake and Longmenshan's southeast push came from the strike of the Indian Plate onto the Eurasian Plate and its northward push; the inter-plate relative motion caused large scale structural deformation inside the Asian continent, resulting in a thinning crust of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the uplift of its landscape and an eastward extrude. Near the Sichuan Basin, Qinghai-Tibet Plateau's east-northward movement meets with strong resistance from the South China Block, causing a high degree of stress accumulation in the Longmenshan thrust formation.
This caused a sudden dislocation in the Yingxiu-Beichuan fracture, leading to the violent earthquake of Ms 8.0." According to the United States Geological Survey: The earthquake occurred as the result of motion on a northeast striking reverse fault or thrust fault on the northwestern margin of the Sichuan Basin. The ea
