One Freaking Huge Building

In the newspaper this week there was an article about Taipei 101 (the world's tallest building, which is about a mile from where I am sitting). As I have noted before, there are a lot of earthquakes here. Since I got here there have been at least 5 or 6. Well, a few local geologists are speculating that Taipei 101 may be partially at fault. The building was constructed on an ancient fault line and it weighs 700,000 tons! The scientists believe that the massive amount of weight concentrated on the fault line may be a contributing factor in the tremors. They noted that prior to the building of the behemoth, there were only a few minor quakes a year. Now, we have a few a month. Thankfully just small quakes. The last major quake was in 1999, it killed 2000 people in Taipei. What a freaky theory...a building instigating disasters.