00:00The only earthquake in history that humans successfully predicted, and scientists still
00:03refuse to call it a win. It was minus 20 degrees. An entire village was tricked into watching an
00:09open-air movie. The film never finished. The houses collapsed. The whole town flattened.
00:16Yet almost nobody was crushed to death. February 4th, 1975.
00:21Haicheng, Liaoning, China. Magnitude 7.3. This is the only time in human history an
00:27official government evacuated residents before an earthquake hit, and actually survived it.
00:32It sounds like a miracle. But that miracle lasted only a year and a half.
00:36On July 28th, 1976, another city. The same method. 240,000 people never made it out.
00:45Let's be clear first, this wasn't divine intervention. Starting in January 1975,
00:50Haicheng felt a string of small tremors. Nobody paid attention. The rail turn came on the night
00:56of February 3rd, small quakes suddenly clustered. The seismic log reads, from evening to 3 a.m.,
01:02three tremors. By 8 a.m., over 200. Over that whole day, more than 500 smaller quakes.
01:08The biggest, a 4.74 shock, collapsed chimneys in some homes. The head of the Inco seismic office
01:14was a man everyone called Old Chao. His desk wasn't piled with clean data, it was a mess of
01:19strange reports. Well water dropping. Horses screaming. That was it. Chao went to the
01:26provincial government and demanded an emergency meeting. Here's what you have to understand.
01:31Issuing that order had an enormous cost. It was the eve of Chinese New Year. Outside,
01:36minus 10 to minus 20 degrees. If you moved the entire population outdoors and the quake didn't come
01:42for days, frostbite. Panic. Rumors. A refugee crisis. And Anshan, a massive steel city, had most
01:50of its workers' families right there in Haicheng. Get it right, you're lucky. Get it wrong, all of
01:56that lands on one man's head. And his only evidence was well water and horses. On February 4th, about
02:02six hours before the emergency meeting, Inco County officially issued a zero-hour prediction.
02:07The first time in earthquake defense history a county government independently issued such a
02:11prediction and organized effective self-rescue. The real difficulty wasn't giving the order.
02:16It was execution. At minus 20 degrees, how do you keep a whole village outside? You can't command it.
02:22You have to give them a reason. So the brigade made a decision later written into countless papers,
02:28hold an outdoor movie. On frozen ground, a white cloth screen. The whole village dragged out their
02:33stools. At 7.36 p.m., the movie was still playing. Magnitude 7.3 hit. Total casualties.
02:4118,308, only 0.2% of the population. Of those, 1,328 died. For a 7.3 quake that
02:50flattened an entire
02:51city, those numbers are impossibly low. Some experts estimate that night at least 100,000 deaths were
02:57avoided. But here's the strangest part. How did those 1,328 people actually die? Most weren't crushed by
03:04buildings. After the quake, 3,142 fires in the shelters. 341 burned to death. 372 froze to death.
03:14Fires and cold combined for nearly one-third of all losses, and they happened after people had
03:18already escaped. And nature played a cruel joke. Before the quake, southerly winds pushed temperatures
03:25up. Ice began to melt. Then the wind swung northeast. Heavy snow. Temperatures plunged below minus 20.
03:32A group of people, saved by one prediction, then lived in shelters built from whatever
03:37they could carry. The prediction saved their lives. But nobody predicted where they would
03:42live after escaping death. This story is in Chinese textbooks. But in international seismology,
03:48its position is awkward. Mainstream opinion, acknowledge the result, credit luck.
03:53Haicheng's foreshock sequence was too obvious. Over 500 small quakes in one day. Even if the bureau
03:59stayed silent, many would have run out on their own. And many did. Some families moved out on the
04:04night of February 3rd, before any government order. So there's a question still unanswered.
04:09Was Haicheng a true successful prediction, or did the earthquake write the answer on its own face,
04:14where anyone could read it? That estimate of 100,000 lives saved rests on the assumption that
04:18the prediction was decisive. Both theories have strong evidence. I'm presenting mainstream research,
04:24not a final verdict. If even this doesn't count as success, then after 50 years, can humanity
04:29predict earthquakes at all? Mainstream science is blunt, short-term earthquake prediction is not
04:34possible. And it may never be. Not because the technology isn't good enough, but because the
04:40exact point where stress in the crust snaps is deeply random. You can estimate how long a rubber
04:44band lasts, but you can't calculate the exact second it breaks. So what do we have left?
04:49Three things. First, long-term probability assessment, which regions are high risk,
04:55used to set building standards. Second, earthquake-resistant construction. That's the
05:00technology that has saved the most lives. Third, earthquake early warning. Note, early warning is
05:06not prediction. These differ by one word, but they're an entire discipline apart. Prediction, the quake
05:12hasn't happened, and you say it's coming. Early warning, the quake has happened, but the destructive
05:17waves travel slower than electronic signals. So the system broadcasts the alert before the shaking
05:22arrives. It buys seconds, up to tens of seconds. That can stop high-speed trains, hold elevators,
05:29let a surgeon pull the scalpel away. It can't save people in the epicenter. But it can save people
05:34tens of kilometers away. And in 1976, Tangshan had none of these. No warning system. Building standards
05:42pitifully low. The only thing to rely on was the Haiching playbook. Haiching fit perfectly.
05:48Tangshan had no foreshock sequence. Number 500 small quakes. No collapsing chimneys. The playbook
05:55that had just created a miracle failed completely. July 28, 1976. 342 AM magnitude 7.8. 240,000 people.
06:06After that, the belief that earthquakes could be predicted was abandoned in Chinese seismology.
06:11So let's return to that white cloth, that unfinished movie. The survivors are real.
06:16What we still can't say is what saved them, science, or those 500 small quakes that happened
06:21to come at just the right time. Humanity's only escape from an earthquake was probably not because
06:25we calculated it right. It was because that time, the earthquake spoke first. Now a question about
06:31tomorrow. If your city announced, a strong quake may hit within three days, everyone must sleep
06:36outside. It's winter. You have elderly parents and young children. Do you go? Don't answer
06:43too fast. It's minus 10 degrees, and you have to keep them out there for three.
06:50Hello...
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