Laibach earthquake in 1895
The earthquake in Ljubljana , in which the capital of the then Duchy of Carniola was devastated on April 14, 1895 , was the most destructive earthquake in this area. It had an epicentral intensity of 8 to 9 degrees . As a result, a separate “earthquake commission” was set up at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna . Based on the observations of the Austrian geologist Franz Eduard Suess and the reported damage, one of the first Isoseist maps was created .
course
Shortly after 11:16 p.m. CET , residents of Ljubljana and the surrounding area heard loud noises and the shaking of the ground. People fled the city without taking their luggage or locking their doors and sought shelter in wooden buildings. Several tremors took place in short periods of time. Around 4 a.m., an even stronger quake occurred. At 7 o'clock the earthquake sequence ended with one final, minor tremor. A total of 30 to 40 tremors took place that night.
The earthquake was the worst in Slovenia after the great earthquakes in Friuli in 1348 and 1511 and 1515 and up to the one in 1976 .
Damage
When people returned to the city, most of it was devastated. The streets were filled with rubble. All the house walls were cracked and torn. All the buildings in the city had suffered more or less severe damage. The security work was started immediately by the municipal building authorities and the military authorities. Many streets were completely cordoned off. Large wooden pillars were installed where there was danger as a result of the loosened walls. About half of all the houses in the city were supported by such beams.
Because of the vacation time, most of the Cisleithan government under kk Prime Minister Alfred III. to Windisch-Grätz in the newspaper of the following Tuesday about the earthquake. The Neue Freie Presse reported on "panic" that was also felt in the cities of Opatija , Rijeka and Trieste . The geologist Franz Eduard Suess was commissioned by the Imperial and Royal Geological Institute and the Imperial and Royal Ministry of Education on April 16, 1895 to investigate the earthquake and on the same evening set out by train to Laibach. Edmund Mojsisovics von Mojsvár , the deputy director of the Imperial Geological Institute , distributed questionnaires and asked the newspapers to print requests for more information. The Reichsanstalt collected over 1,300 reports from over 900 locations.
Five commissions were busy for more than a month with the official surveys on the condition and damage of the buildings.
The damage amounted to:
- 2,704,100 guilders (florins) in private buildings
- 174,100 florins to churches, parishes and monastery buildings
- 34,000 florins in municipal buildings
- 22,000 florins in landscaped buildings
State buildings were not included in these figures reported by Franz Eduard Suess .
10% of the buildings were officially designated for demolition. In the city itself, two deaths could be directly linked to the earthquake. The earthquake claimed five more victims in the area. The number of unreported cases was probably higher due to the large number of wounded and due to the illnesses and deaths in hospitals, which were mainly caused in children due to the trauma and overnight stays in the open air.
The earthquake was felt in the fifth degree of intensity in South Tyrol and Vienna. The earthquake impact zone was 47,000 km² .
consequences
After the earthquake, the Krainer state government wanted to have a seismograph built at the Imperial Academy. 1896 was Slovenian Seismologe and scientists Albin Belar (1864-1939) from the imperial Naval Academy Fiume hired. In 1897, through donations from the Krainer Sparkasse, he succeeded in building the first seismological station in Laibach, which was also one of the first in Europe and was equipped with modern instruments. The director of the Krainer Sparkasse at the time was the German national politician and manager Josef Suppan , brother of the geographer Alexander Supan . In addition, Belars station was also supported by several archdukes , which led to debates about the imperial authority in the south Slavic countries of Austria-Hungary.
Ten years after the earthquake, the Imperial Academy in Vienna set up an earthquake commission, which in its early form was decentralized. Each crown land had a reporter who was responsible for recruiting volunteers.
The Ljubljana City Council invited several prominent architects , including Camillo Sitte and Max Fabiani , to address the immediate effects of the earthquake and regulate the future expansion of the city.
literature
- Franz E. Suess: The Laibach earthquake on April 14, 1895. In: Jahrb. Dkk geol. Reichsanstalt, 1896, Volume 46, Issue 3, pp. 412–479 ( Article pdf , opac.geologie.ac.at).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Some seismotectonic characteristics of the Ljubljana Basin, Slovenia . The Smithsonian / NASA Astrophysics Data System. bibcode : 2012EGUGA..14.9370B
- ↑ Earthquake from Slovenia strongly felt in Austria . Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics. 4th December 2012.
- ^ Reports of the Federal Geological Institute . Volume 96, Vienna 2012. ISSN 1017-8880 , pp. 16-17.
- ^ Franz Eduard Suess: The Laibach earthquake on April 14, 1895 . In: Yearbook of the Imperial and Royal Geological Institute 1896, Vienna 1897, pp. 411–888, digitized online at opac.geologie.ac.at (PDF; 29.3 MB).
- ↑ a b c d Deborah R. Coen. The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter . University of Chicago Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-226-11181-0 , pp. 153-157.
- ^ Franz Eduard Sueß. Geological history: dynamic geology . BoD - Books on Demand, 2014, ISBN 978-3-8460-9265-1 , p. 487.
- ^ Sergei Bubnov. Government role in mitigating the impacts of earthquakes in Yugoslavia . (PDF; 341 kB) International Disaster Relief Strategy of the United Nations, p. 560.
- ↑ Dimitra Babalis. Chronocity: The Scale of Sustainable Change: Heritage Value and Future Opportunities and Challenges . Alinea Editrice, 2008, ISBN 978-88-6055-346-1 , p. 106.