The Videos From the Myanmar Earthquakes Are Horrifying. This One Haunted Me Most of All.
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Twenty years into the smartphone era, you can depend on seeing a natural disaster on video a few seconds after it occurs. If a rainstorm floods a subway tunnel or a fire consumes a residential neighborhood, a real-time documentary is not far behind.
On Friday at midday local time, a 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck central Myanmar. Thousands are feared dead. Even in one of the poorest countries in the world, footage of the event itself was immediately available: monks cowering as a building collapsed down the block, a stupa tipping off a temple building in a shower of red dirt. Hundreds of miles away in Bangkok, a construction worker filmed his colleagues running from a half-finished skyscraper as it collapsed into a cloud of dust.
I’m mesmerized by a relatively new entrant into this genre: The sight of rooftop pools sloshing over their parapets, raining water onto the streets below. A handful of skyscrapers in Bangkok spilled over on Friday. Like a lamp swinging from the ceiling, these high-rise waterfalls are a testament to the seismically generated building movement that can be hard to see with the naked eye. Water suddenly appears in places there is not supposed to be water. It’s like seeing a building cry.
If you really want a lesson in fluid dynamics, you can watch the videos of the pools themselves.
It’s unsettling to see a tall building spill its drink like a drunk at a party. But ultimately, it’s proof of structural achievement: The buildings rock enough to send hundreds of gallons of water overboard, but in spite of their height, they are strong enough to resist the tremors. (It is the age of a building, not its height, that generally puts occupants at risk during an earthquake.)
While this phenomenon is not brand new—quake-driven rooftop pool waterfalls have been caught on camera in Manila, Puerto Vallarta, and Taipei in recent years—it’s increasingly frequent. And not just because more people are pointing their phones at the sky.
Putting a pool at the top of a building is a relatively recent development in the history of high-rise construction. Water is heavy (don’t fill up an inflatable pool on your roof), and when pools aren’t well-built, the damage can be enormous. There’s a reason landlords don’t want tenants to have fish tanks.
According to a report on high-rise pools from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, Chicago’s John Hancock Center was the first super-tall building to offer a swim with a view when its 44th-floor pool opened in 1969. But as recently as 2000, most of the world’s super-tall buildings (over 900 feet) did not include pools. That has changed: Since the millennium, most of them do.
Some of that reflects the engineering innovations that have allowed giant buildings to proliferate in recent decades. But it’s also a testament to the changing geography of global growth, as skyscraper construction has shifted from North America and Europe to the Gulf and East Asia. Two-thirds of the world’s super-tall buildings have been built in China and the UAE alone, and rooftop pools are obviously a more desirable amenity in warm-weather locales.
In Southeast Asia, the skyscrapers with rooftop pools—often flanked by cocktail bars, dance floors, or expensive restaurants—are a societal status symbol. The most famous visual landmark associated with Singapore is probably the Marina Bay Sands, with Moshe Safdie’s oblong, swimmable rooftop straddling three buildings.
Most rooftop pools aren’t so easy to spot from below. And that’s part of what makes the videos from Bangkok so revelatory. Disasters pretend to be egalitarian. Ultimately, though, they expose the fissures in society, revealing the disparate experiences between those who have a well-built home, an insurance policy, or somewhere else to go—and those who do not. When water tumbles from a roof, it reveals the power of the earthquake, but also the hidden inequality of the city, provoking the sudden realization, from a lower floor or a hot street below, that those people up there can go for a swim.
Meanwhile, in Myanmar, first responders are trying to find people trapped in the wreckage of collapsed structures. The grim reason it takes a long time to confirm an earthquake’s death toll is that many people, if not most, survive the initial collapse. What determines their fate is how quickly someone comes to look for them.
