Santiago will host an important regional conference on earthquakes 25-27 July. Engineer Rafael Corominas Pepin, one of the nation’s leading experts on earthquakes, said that the conference will present the recent experiences of Mexico, Venezuela and Costa Rica regarding the reinforcing of buildings in order to prevent major disasters during an earthquake. Corominas explained that the city of Santiago is very vulnerable to earthquakes. He said that five kilometers from the city, the Caribbean and North American tectonic plates meet. (see http://geology.er.usgs.gov/eastern/plates.html) The plate crosses the island entering by way of the Manzanillo Bay leaving through Samana Peninsula. The conference will be a follow up to the Pentrose Conference held in 1999 that brought together 72 earthquake specialists from all throughout the world. Speaking for the Dominican Seismological, Corominas says that the greatest concern regards buildings that were built prior to the implementation of the 1979 Seismological Code and that may not be prepared to resist a major earthquake. The Dominican Seismological Society (Sodosismica) wants to revise the construction of buildings where large concentrations of people occur on a daily basis, such as movie houses, schools and hospitals. In the DR, the cities most vulnerable to suffer a major earthquake are Santiago, La Vega, Moca and most of the central Cibao area. “It is not that you cannot build over an earthquake fault. What happens is that the structures have to be designed to resist the energy that could be generated in an earthquake,” he said.
