Beware of complacency when it comes to earthquakes
Credit to Author: THE MANILA TIMES| Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2019 16:14:35 +0000
TWO strong earthquakes in less than two weeks in Mindanao certainly rattled the nerves of the people in the affected areas, but despite diligent news coverage, the tremors failed to stir the rest of the country. This indicates a complacency among the public and, we fear, much of the government, a lack of urgency that will inevitably be punished if not corrected.
On Tuesday morning, an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.6 struck near the town of Tulunan, North Cotabato, causing damage to buildings and creating havoc across a wide area. As of Wednesday, the death toll from the quake stood at seven, with hundreds of people injured.
On October 16, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake occurred near the town of Makilala, North Cotabato. That quake also killed seven people and injured 215 others, according to government figures.
In the aftermath of the disasters, the government has made all the right noises, reassuring the public that it is taking appropriate steps to provide relief and recovery to the affected areas, and enjoining the public to be mindful of the country’s seismic threats. But apart from the obvious actions that need to be taken to see that injured and displaced persons are attended to and damage to government buildings and infrastructure is assessed and repaired, there is little to nothing being proactively done to try to minimize the harm a future earthquake could cause.
Practically the entire country is at risk from major earthquakes, but the threat is most serious in Metro Manila, where an earthquake along the West Valley Fault would cause an estimated 34,000 deaths and destroy several hundred thousand structures, according to several studies of the scenario. Such an event is inevitable; the West Valley Fault historically has large earthquakes of about magnitude 7 every 400 to 500 years. It has been 361 years since the last one in 1658.
The government’s response to this eventuality has been to produce hazard maps showing to what degree various areas of the metropolis would be affected by a quake of about magnitude 7.2 — publicizing the frightening casualty and damage estimates for such a quake, and encouraging people to participate in occasional “earthquake drills” designed to test the readiness of emergency personnel and concerned government agencies, as well as individual evacuation plans and preparedness.
These activities are hardly sufficient. When — not if — the “big one” happens in Metro Manila, it will be a disaster of unimaginable scale unless more is done to prepare for it.
The public side of the problem is that a large-scale earthquake in Metro Manila is an abstraction. The “big one” that periodically hits the West Valley Fault has not occurred in living memory. Other earthquakes that have affected Metro Manila within people’s lifespans have been relatively minor. One has to go all the way back to the 1990 Luzon quake for one that caused a significant amount of damage in the city, and back more than 50 years to the 1968 Casiguran earthquake that caused a significant number of human casualties. Without a familiar object lesson, the threat does not seem real, particularly since earthquakes are entirely unpredictable. Government efforts to conduct earthquake drills and provide information about “what you should do in case of an earthquake,” while necessary, are not taken seriously.
That leaves it to the government to try to protect the people from their own lack of attention, and in this regard the government could be doing much more than it already is. It is not enough to simply make predictions about what will happen in a large earthquake; firm steps need to be taken to try to prevent or reduce those 34,000 deaths and limit the damage to infrastructure and buildings.
There is a growing concern, for example, that Philippine materials standards and building codes are insufficient to protect against the damage from strong earthquakes. These should be reviewed and updated as required. Also, other issues that are not obviously related to earthquake preparedness, but will be huge obstacles to relief and recovery efforts — traffic congestion, shortage of medical facilities and personnel and vulnerable communications infrastructure — must also be addressed more aggressively. The notion that Filipinos are “resilient” and can work through almost any sort of difficulties is an admirable trait, but if the people and the government were to stop counting on that and properly prepare for the big one, no one actually needs to be resilient.