![]() ![]() We have 600 square meters free at the back which could be used for that,” Malapitan said. We haven’t allocated anything for repairs of this building next year to give way for a new building. Almost half of small businesses will fail. Whether it’s the magnitude-9 Big One that strikes first, or smallerbut equally deadlytemblors, recovery will take years, not weeks. The human and economic devastation of the coming West Coast earthquakes is unimaginable. “My office, along with the revenue-generating departments-Business Permits, Assessor’s, Treasury, and Budget-are all in this old building. The Cascadia Fault: An Inconvenient Truth. The city government is also drafting plans to build a replacement for the aging Caloocan City Hall, with the main building built in 1952, and which could be way past its usable life and could end in catastrophe in an earthquake. The city was particularly concerned about a four-story school building in Bagong Silang, the Pag-Asa Elementary School, which has been disused and would be soon demolished. A controversial study argues that at least eight times in the past 3,000 years, quakes made a onetwo punch off the west coast of the United States. That’s why I’ve given an instruction for our city engineers to inspect government buildings, especially schools, if they are structurally sound,” Malapitan said. But we’re already preparing now for this type of calamity. These scenarios can happen, but they also can’t happen, if we do something,” he said.Ĭaloocan Mayor Oscar Malapitan, who attended the conference at the City Hall together with department heads and representatives of about 100 businesses in the city, said he was surprised at the findings. ![]() “Residents and businesses can also seek help to fix their houses and buildings to spot design flaws and rectify them. Solidum urged the local government to assess if they had enough bed capacity to deal with the injuries and deaths that could be brought about by the quake. The data we have say that it can happen in this generation or the next,” he said. “It’s more prudent to prepare for a big earthquake. “We will have a very different picture of damage compared to the current situation in Bohol and Cebu should an earthquake of that magnitude strike Metro Manila, and that’s because of the thick population density here, an urban area,” Solidum said.Īccording to Solidum, the West Valley Fault, which stretches across Metro Manila from San Mateo in Rizal in the north, to Quezon City, Marikina, Pasig, Makati, Taguig, and to Parañaque in the south, usually moves violently in cycles of about 300 years. Gianni Jaccoma is a staff writer for Thrillist, and he's glad he doesn't live on the West Coast.To arrive at these scenarios, Solidum said that Phivolcs analyzed the location of buildings and the composition of the ground where they stood, the use of these structures, materials used in the building, and the number of people occupying these buildings. As for whether it'll be enough, well we'll find out in 50 years. Nobody even knew the Cascadia Subduction Zone existed 45 years ago - now, though, seismologists and geologists are closely monitoring the CSZ, and both the state and federal governments are beginning to take steps toward averting the disaster of a catastrophic earthquake in the northwestern United States. ![]() That insanely high number comes courtesy of the fault's size and location (running alongside Northwestern California, all of Oregon and Washington, and nearly half of Vancouver Island). That means the next event could happen within the next century, or as soon as 50 years from now.Īs Kathryn Schulz explains in her fascinating New Yorker piece (bookmark that), FEMA estimates a magnitude 8 or 9 CSZ earthquake - and the ensuing tsunami - could result in nearly 13,000 deaths (40,000 total casualties). According to scientific estimates, the CSZ experiences a magnitude 8-9 earthquake every 200-500 years, and as luck would have it, we're about 300 years out from the last one. The Cascadia Subduction Zone gets its name from the Cascade Mountain Range, and the "subduction zone" part essentially means it's an area where two tectonic plates meet, and one slides beneath another. ![]()
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