The tragedy in Turkey, with more than 60,000 dead in a recent earthquake, has caused a new awareness on the high risk of building on seismic faults.
Seismic engineer Leonardo Reyes Madera for more than 30 years had been advocating people take measures to mitigate the impact of earthquakes in the Dominican Republic. Several major faults run through the island and governments have ignored these and used the land for construction of public schools and hospitals.
Reyes Madera is a former president of the Dominican Society of Seismology and Earthquake Engineering. Now, from his position as general director of the National Office of Seismic Evaluation and Vulnerability of Infrastructure and Buildings (Onesvie), Reyes Madera has the responsibility to contribute from the government to mitigate this risk.
Onesvie is a prevention institution whose original mission is to assess the vulnerability of the buildings constructed prior to the code that governs in this matter.
He says that in the next few days a bidding process will be opened to intervene the first public schools that were built on known seismic faults.
In a special interview with elCaribe-CDN, the head of Onesvie explained that the first Dominican seismic regulation dates back to 1979. He has ascertained that in 95% of the buildings, the effects of earthquakes have not been considered.
A new regulation was created in 2011. When evaluating its application, Reyes Madera says the Ministry of Public Works did not take into consideration the effects of earthquakes in buildings with less than four floors. Consequently, public health centers and schools, which are generally one-, two- and three-story buildings, were built with the same vulnerability, he said.
Eleven years after the publication of the code, it is understood that all buildings built after this regulation should have seismic considerations, but this is not the case, he observed.
“Many engineers play around and try to cheat the regulations so that the costs of the buildings remain at a competitive level,” he revealed. In other words, on paper they adhere to the standard, but in practice, they stray from it.
He said the consequences of not doing so can be seen in what happened in Turkey.
“But there is something interesting, it is assumed that when you make a code what is built from then on is already safe. It does not have that high danger of collapsing, or of people dying, because what kills people are the buildings, the bridges that fall down, it is not the earthquake, it is what we do,” he pointed out.
However, he maintains that this type of code, in the field of construction, is subject to updates, based on the experience of different countries with these natural phenomena, which are otherwise unpredictable.
This situation, according to Reyes Madera’s approach, forces the revision of the buildings and infrastructures that have already been built. In addition, it creates the space to evaluate the future of the constructions and the need to unify criteria in that direction.
“We have now found ourselves with a whole movement that Latin America and the Caribbean are joining, which is called the Preparation of the Seismic Model Code for Latin America and the Caribbean, where we are included and the headquarters will be in our country at the end of July of this year, God willing,” he announced.
He speaks of an approach in which, in addition to saving lives, property is also protected. “The model code that is being developed gives us the opportunity to readapt and revise our 2011 code to ride on that path as well,” he said.
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El Caribe
8 March 2023