Your house is not along the faultline. What now?

[Image from tulisanes.wordpress.com]

A friend linked to this blog article:

http://tulisanes.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/is-your-house-standing-on-an-earthquake-faultline

Obviously, the author has good intentions, although he is seemingly not an engineer (or maybe still a young engineer?). The impression I'm getting though is that the article is suggesting to check whether your house/property is along one of the published faultlines. If it is, you're obviously in danger. But it might also give the impression that if you are a good distance away, you probably shouldn't worry.

It’s good to inform people but it’s not so good to inform them of only half the truth. The whole truth is, it doesn’t matter if you are living along a faultline or not*. The truth is, whether your home or place of work is within 5 meters or within 50 km (or even father) from the faultlines, i.e. if you are living in the Philippines (other than in Palawan), and they were not properly engineered to the latest standard** — either you didn’t get an engineer to design it properly, or you got an engineer but he didn’t design it properly, or you got an engineer and did his job but the contractor or architect insisted on other things — your life and property are at risk.

I visited Tacloban recently and this is the same thing I saw in typhoon-preparedness. People don't hire engineers for their homes. Or they do, but they don't do their job properly (e.g. they might be thinking wind is not as strong as earthquake shaking therefore it doesn't need to be considered). Or they want to, but engineers are... expensive? (Aren't lives and property that important?) Anyways, I saw people already rebuilt their homes -- which is good -- but they rebuilt them only the exact same way they built it before Yolanda. No engineering. No nothing. From an economic standpoint, obviously it's the best option, but it's more complicated than you think. For example, I always tell my students, if you built your home "wind-proof" but your neighbours didn't, and their roof crashed into yours during a windstorm -- and nobody designs for roofs crashing on roofs, it's too costly -- then it almost didn't matter that you exerted effort to "wind-proof" your home. So people would just resign to a less wind-proof home and just suffer the losses. Et cetera, et cetera. It's very, very complicated.

But I see that there are two solutions to all this (that I hope to expand on on a future blog article): education and then engineering. The education, as I suggested here, shouldn't be partial. It shouldn't be a "You should be afraid of X (therefore you should do Y)" type of education such as the blog article I linked to, but rather a "There is X, and you have A, B, and C options" one. Once the education goal is achieved, engineering can proceed. This goes for everyone -- including engineers. Engineers should constantly educate themselves, and seek the whole story, not just be satisfied with whatever they read because it may not be relevant anymore, or that it is only part of a much larger context.

Yes, it is very complicated. But the simple point is this: to get proper engineering, step one is proper education.

* As the Metro Manila Earthquake Impact Reduction Study (MMEIRS) suggests. See also, from the same blog but on a different article: http://tulisanes.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/mmeirs-scenario-8-magnitude-7-2-earthquake-along-the-west-valley-fault-system-by-jane-t-punongbayan-ph-d-4/
** If your building/house/structure was designed and built after 2001, when the latest modern structural code that accounts for these faultlines was published, higher chance you will be safe if you hired an engineer and he did his job. Note also that many people die because of non-structural falling hazards such as heavy furnitures, ceilings, broken glass, etc. You don’t need to be along a faultline to experience those.

NOTE: Updated on 15 Jan. 2014 to reflect the new web address of the blog I was referring to. (It was previously on tulisanes1860.wordpress.com; it is now on tulisanes.wordpress.com.)