U.S., Soviet Scientists Join in Attack on World Ecology Ills

The U.S. and Soviet academies of science Tuesday announced the formation of a new joint committee on global ecological concerns whose mission, they said, rivals in importance that of the panels exploring arms reductions.

“Both (the ecology panel and arms committee) are addressing the most important problems that influence the survival of mankind,” said Academician Igor Makarov, scientific secretary of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

At a meeting in Irvine, the two groups also revealed that the U.S. National Academy of Sciences will send a 16-member delegation of technical experts to Soviet Armenia “in order to improve scientific understanding of such earthquakes, engineering knowledge of the failure of structures and techniques for post-disaster assessment,” according to a joint statement.

The team, headed by seismologist John Filson of the U.S. Geological Survey and civil engineer Mikhran Agbabian of USC, will leave “within several days,” said Frank Press, president of the National Academy of Sciences.

The newly established Joint Committee on Global Ecology is designed to consider the scientific and policy aspects of some of the most pressing environmental problems confronting humanity, including the greenhouse effect, deterioration of the ozone layer and the loss of plant and animal species throughout the world.

The committee was created, according to a joint statement, because the Earth’s “ecological security” is now endangered. “The consequences of the rapid growth of our population coupled with global economic development now pose a significant threat to our continued existence,” the statement said.

“The special mission of the committee will be to provide an early warning mechanism for identifying long-range environmental and ecological problems and bringing them to the attention of the U.S. and Soviet governments,” Press said.

Academician Georgy A. Arbatov, director of the United States of America and Canada Institute in Moscow noted that governmental leaders had not responded to scientists’ warnings more than two decades ago that construction of pulp and paper mills along the shores of Lake Baikal would severely damage the lake’s ecosystem. “Ministers can be every bit as greedy and irresponsible as any industrialists,” he said.

The first meeting of the new joint committee will be held in the Soviet Union during the first half of 1989.

Among the objectives of the committee will be the gathering of data about climatic conditions and numbers of species, for example, so that future changes can be more readily recognized. The committee also hopes to identify gaps in research where new effort is needed, and to develop practical approaches to improving the compatibility of expanding economies in developing countries and ecological preservation.

Immediate Objective

The National Academy’s earthquake team has a more immediate objective in its visit to Soviet Armenia.

“The main purpose is to find out exactly what happened and whether or not some of the buildings are fit for occupancy or should not be reoccupied,” said Agbabian, director of USC’s Center for Research in Earthquake Engineering and Construction.

Agbabian, who is of Armenian extraction, has served as a lecturer at the Polytechnic Institute in the Armenian capital of Yerevan and as an earthquake consultant in that region.

He said he believes that the intensity of the shaking from the earthquake was far greater than buildings in the area had been designed to withstand. Furthermore, he added, pressures for housing are so great that in many cases building codes are not enforced.

“Quality procedures are so very poor that some (buildings) must have fallen short of expectations,” he said.

By contrast, buildings in the Los Angeles Basin are designed for the same level of intensity that had been expected to hit the Armenian region. But they would probably fare better here in a similar quake because “we design the structures to be energy absorbing,” thus increasing their chances of surviving an even greater quake, he said. The concept is to reduce the number of “brittle” failures by allowing structures to yield, thus absorbing the energy rather than fighting it, he added.

Agbabian said he has toured the entire region of the “seismic belt” that runs through the southern part of the Soviet Union, and “the construction techniques are almost identical from one end to the other.”

The ability of any structure to withstand an earthquake depends largely on the type of reinforcement that is used in the building. In Armenia, as in Southern California, the primary reinforcing material consists of steel rods either embedded in concrete or used to tie various parts of the structure together, he said.

Normally, when a building collapses, steel rods can be seen protruding from the rubble, but like other experts who have viewed photographs from the stricken area, Agbabian noted that many buildings that collapsed during the earthquake do not show evidence of reinforcing steel rods. That suggests that builders never installed them.

Depend on Reinforcing

He identified several types of structures, all of which depend on reinforcing for their structural integrity. One common type is similar to the lift-slab construction used in the United States in which prefabricated concrete slabs are shipped to a building site and used for floors and bearing walls.

The strength of that type of structure, he said, depends on the steel rods that are supposed to hold the components together. If the rods are not in place, or improperly installed, the building with probably fail, he said.

Agbabian said he expects the team to leave from either Washington or New York next Sunday.