Along the driveway of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) in Quezon City, there is a small green hut with a lamp at the center that swings gently or violently depending on the earthquake’s intensity. Phivolcs personnel call it the Shaking Table, but it’s more than a piece of furniture. The open structure is an earthquake simulator device that replicates the varied intensities of a tremor, the only one of its kind in the country. The simple device was built a decade after a devastating magnitude-7.8 earthquake struck Luzon in 1990, toppling tall buildings in Baguio City and burying hundreds of victims under mounds of rubble. The tremor was stronger than the magnitude-7.2 earthquake that struck Haiti last week, which damaged billions in property and claimed thousands of lives. In the wake of the 1990 disaster, the Philippine government developed the Phivolcs Earthquake Intensity Scale (PEIS) the following year to describe the movements during a tremor, according to Ma. Mylene Villegas, Chief Science Research Specialist of Phivolcs.
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“Pakistan and Turkey usually use bricks for their structures," said Villegas, explaining that bricks are more vulnerable to collapse. The 1999 magnitude-7.4 earthquake in Turkey claimed about 14,000 lives. Pakistan’s 2005 magnitude-7.6 tremor killed 79,000, blamed partly on poor construction. “The Philippines’ buildings have a good chance of surviving similar strong tremors if the 2000 National Building Code was followed during the construction," explains Villegas. Department of Public Works and Highways Undersecretary Romeo Momo supports this view. “Our flyovers are guaranteed safe. High- and medium-rise buildings have complied with the design requirements of the National Building Code, upgrading the standards of structures to withstand quakes of up to Intensity VIII," he said in an interview on dzXL radio Tuesday. However, he added that buildings constructed before the year 2000, especially low-budget
socialized housing projects, may be vulnerable to damage from strong tremors. -
YA, GMANews.TV