Earthquakes

     Like floods and famines, earthquakes are great natural misfortunes. They are very common. A mild tremor is harmless, but a strong quake can be dreadfully destructive. We are quite helpless against such awful geographical upheavals. It is quite beyond our reach to control them. When an earthquake takes place, we remain quite helpless puny creatures against the monstrous nature. In spite of our scientific progress, we cannot know when and where a big quake will take place. It is true that we can have earthquake-proof buildings. Japan has developed such architecture but they too have their own limits.

    The earthquakes are caused by the earth’s internal vapor-pressure, or the pressures exerted by rocks and mountain upon the earth’s surface, and upon one another. An earthquake may last a few seconds or a few minutes. During a mild quake, things begin to tremble. We feel the earth dropping always from under us. A deep rumbling underground noise is heard. All this soon passes off like a bad dream. But in a severe earthquake, houses fall down, roads split, bridges go down, rivers are flooded, seas agitated. There is all round destruction. Whole villages and towns disappear. Entire population is buries alive. There are horrible scenes of suffering and death. Earthquakes also cause diseases and floods and fires and famines.

    There have been terrible earthquake in Japan, India, and Peru and in part of America one such terrible earthquake had been in Marthwada region in latur district. Thousands of men women and children got buried in it. It was a horrible sight. These frightful events bring home to us our pitiful smallness and weakness, and the terrific might and cruelty of nature. They sometimes bring out the worst in us. People have killed and robbed one another during earthquakes. But they also bring out the best in us. Many acts of heroic rescue and noble self-sacrifice have relieved the gloom cast by earthquakes. Thus they reveal the hidden aspects of man and the nature.