Earthquake safety requires more than just awareness

IN the wake of the catastrophic earthquake that devastated large areas of Turkey and Syria on February 6, there has been renewed concern among government officials and the public about the Philippines’ own considerable earthquake risk. It probably should not take a calamity elsewhere to raise awareness here, but it is understandable that it happens that way, and as has been the case after other disasters, some proposals have been made to address the risks faced by the Philippines. For example, a plan has been put forward to conduct safety inspections of several thousand buildings around Metro Manila, and Sen. Christopher Lawrence “Bong” Go has proposed a measure that would strengthen the National Building Code.

However, the astonishing scale of the disaster in Turkey and Syria demonstrates that heightened awareness and concern about earthquake risks are not enough. As of Friday morning, February 17, Turkish and Syrian authorities reported at least 43,885 deaths from the earthquake, and the toll is almost certainly higher, as the casualty figures from parts of Syria controlled by the various rebel groups in that country’s long civil war are not completely reliable. It is by far the worst earthquake disaster in Turkey’s modern history, with a death toll almost three times that of the 1999 Izmit earthquake, which killed about 17,000 people.

The reason for the large number of dead and injured in the latest earthquake is already known; an extraordinarily large number of buildings — an estimated 7,000 in Turkey alone — collapsed, either in the initial earthquake or as a result of aftershocks, or in some cases, hours or days after the earthquake due to being fatally weakened. What was most alarming about the building collapses was that many of those that failed were built after Turkey updated its building codes to require better earthquake resistance in 1999 — after the Izmit quake — and again in 2018.

Engineering experts in Turkey and elsewhere have identified three causes for the large number of building collapses. First, the earthquake was indeed extraordinarily powerful; it had a magnitude of 7.8 and occurred at a relatively shallow depth, releasing energy roughly equivalent to a 5-megaton nuclear bomb. Even well-built buildings would be pushed to their limit by such an earthquake, but the second problem was, in spite of strict building standards, many buildings were not well-built due to corruption and lax enforcement; the Turkish government on Thursday announced that it had arrested more than 50 building inspectors and contractors for corruption.

Design flaw

The third problem, however, is one that should cause great worry in the Philippines because the same design flaw is common in construction here. Many of the buildings that fell in Turkey were, in fact, built according to code using properly strong materials but collapsed anyway due to their “soft story” design. A soft story building is a multilevel structure in which the ground-floor level contains a large open space, such as a terrace, parking area or space for a shop. It is a common form of construction throughout Asia, particularly in dense urban areas, because it allows building owners and occupants to maximize limited space. This creates a weakness in the building even if it is well-constructed, so that in a strong earthquake, it is susceptible to a “pancake” type collapse.

This is what happened in Turkey, and this is what would happen here; if you are in Metro Manila or one of the country’s other dense urban areas, chances are you can look out your window and see soft-story buildings all around you. You may in fact be living or working in one.

The only solution to reduce this risk is to either retrofit or replace these types of buildings, either of which is a tremendously expensive proposition. Improved building codes, provided, of course, that they are properly enforced, can reduce the risk for future buildings. However, the government must find a way to substantially address the large-scale risk posed by existing buildings; simply issuing new rules and standards, and leaving it to property owners to solve whatever problems they find in their own buildings is not likely to accomplish much, given the cost and effort required.