Engineers: lives lost in Mexico quake could have been saved

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Nearly two-thirds of the buildings that collapsed in Mexico City’s monstrous earthquake last month were built using a construction method that is now forbidden in seismic hotspots in the United States, Chile and New Zealand, according to new data compiled by a team of structural engineers at Stanford University.
The suspect building technique called flat slab — in which floors are supported only by concrete columns — caused 61 percent of the building co