Published in the Singapore Business Review, 5 December 2011 http://bit.ly/vIPCg0

I believe Singapore will eventually experience a severe earthquake. I’m not a pessimist; I’m a realist. You can’t live 400 hundred kilometers from a major earthquake fault and say there is no risk of earthquake.

The kitchen drawers in my 23rd floor Singapore home rolled open by themselves in the “tremor” from Sumatra in February 2008. That was a 7.0 magnitude earthquake. What happens after one that’s 8.0? Or 9.0, like Fukushima?

You understand that 9.0 is one hundred times stronger than 7.0, right?

As an organizational resilience professional, I imagine these consequences in Singapore:
• Civil Defense focused on high-priority locations. Ambulances simply unavailable
• Damaged office towers too risky to re-enter, and BCA inspectors overwhelmed
• Hundreds of employees and customers injured by falling glass
• Broken telecom lines and jammed mobile circuits
• Collapsed or buried segments of MRT track, and impassable road surfaces
• Damaged water, sewer and electric power lines
• Thousands of people trying to acquire drinking water
• Toilets that flush once but don’t refill
• Panic cash withdrawals from ATMs, only some of which will be functioning  Read more... (673 words, 1 image, estimated 2:42 mins reading time)

I found this poster last month on a wall in a corporate training facility in Singapore.  Do you think its publishers take earthquakes seriously?  Read more... (772 words, 1 image, estimated 3:05 mins reading time)

• The poster is on A4 size (letter-size) paper, so you have to be within 60 cm (2 feet) of it to read it. The text is in a 10-point san-serif font, too small to be read easily (at least by me).
• Notice the word “tremors” in the headline. That word perpetuates the absurd – and in my opinion, misleading and therefore dangerous – official fiction here that there has never been an earthquake in Singapore. That shaking that swayed my 16th-floor apartment in February 2008 so much that the kitchen draws rolled open?  Not an earthquake. Just a “tremor.”
• The poster includes six (6) childish images by cartoonist and illustrator Miel Prudencio Ma.  He seems to be the default cartoonist for Singapore government posters. From public toilets to public parks, if a government poster uses cartoons, they’re his work.
• The sub-head is “Precautions You Can Take” for “tremors.” Quick, what precautions does it recommend? OK, take a few minutes to read it. Now, what precautions does it recommend? I can’t tell, either.
• HDB apparently recommends you protect yourself from falling debris in an earthquake with an umbrella (middle right image). If not, then why is the woman holding an umbrella to protect herself from a falling plant?

It’s hard not to notice the earthquake risk around the Pacific Rim these days. Maybe the risk is actually higher, or maybe I just notice it more, but in the last four months, Asia has had three earthquakes of 6.0 or higher on the Richter scale, the magnitude at which earthquakes are generally considered destructive.

The Wenchuan earthquake in China’s Sichuan province in May drew worldwide attention to the enormous impact of a big earthquake, even in areas with low population density: 70,000 people killed, 18,000 missing, 375,000 injured, and 5 million people homeless. And that was only the second-deadliest earthquake in Chinese history: the Tangshan earthquake was worse (250,000 people killed, 150,000 injured) and that took place just 30 years ago in 1976.

China is in the largest orogenic zone on the planet (that’s how the Himalayas got there), but Wenchuan had “never been considered high-risk compared to cities near other fault lines”, according to Hong Kong-based seismologist Dr. Michael Spranger. And now, after the Wenchuan earthquake, the earthquake risk in China is even higher because of tectonic shifting.

The Indian Ocean earthquake near Sumatra that caused the 2004 tsunami was also in an “unexpected location”, Dr. Spranger said. In fact, Munich Reinsurance reports that Sumatra accounted for nearly a quarter of all earthquakes measuring 6.9 or greater in the world since the 2004 tsunami; Sumatra had accounted for only 2 percent of them in the previous 30 years.  Read more... (1584 words, 0 images, estimated 6:20 mins reading time)

In addition to the event location and magnitude information described in my previous post, subsequent PTWC bulletins for a particular event also list actual or predicted time and location of impact, and wave heights at specific locations.This is the potentially life-saving information everyone near a coast wants to know after a tsunami warning has been issued: will it hit me, and when?

Locations listed in PTWC bulletins for the southern Sumatra undersea earthquakes last week, for example, include both places (“Padang, Indonesia” in the table below) and ocean monitoring buoys in the region (“DART 23401″ in the table below).

GAUGE LOCATION LAT LON TIME AMPL PER
PADANG IDA 0.9S 100.4E 1348Z 0.98M / 3.2FT 34MIN
DART 23401 8.9S 88.5E 1421Z 0.02M / 0.1FT 15MIN

You can enter or cut-and-paste the latitude and longitude for a place or buoy into Google Earth‘s “Fly To” box. The coordinates “8.9 N 88.5 E” are the location of Deep-Ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) buoy 23401, maintained by the Thailand Meteorological Department in the Indian Ocean. This is a global list of buoys.

Indonesia is still struggling to acquire, deploy and maintain buoys off its seismically-active west coast, as this map of current DART buoys regrettably shows. The Asean Earthquake Information Center in Jakarta is a regional information-sharing network that partially compensates for Indonesia’s handicap.  Read more... (285 words, 0 images, estimated 1:08 mins reading time)

I receive email warnings from the U.S. National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Pacific Tsunami Warning Center about earthquakes that might cause tsunami events in the Pacific Rim. The service is fast, free and helpful to emergency response authorities.

Just since late July I’ve received alerts for several earthquakes: two in the South Pacific, two in the Aleutian Islands (Alaska), the big one off the coast of Peru. The PTWC warnings are text-based so they can be received on the lowest common technology denominator, I suppose. The alerts contain no HTML links to the PTWC web site where you could see maps showing the locations of earthquakes.

So I can find it hard to place an event’s latitude and longitude in my mind – “2.7 NORTH 127.5 EAST”, for example. Most people can picture “the coast of Peru,” but I must admit I’m a bit hazy about “North Moluccan Sea.”

Where is that, anyway?

You can find out quickly and simply, and in stunning detail, in Google Earth. Download and install Google Earth (15 megabytes) onto your computer. It’s free. And sign up to receive the PTWC alerts by email. They’re free. too. Then wait for an alert message to show up in your mailbox.

Inside each alert you’ll find data for these parameters:  Read more... (479 words, 0 images, estimated 1:55 mins reading time)

UNESCO‘s International Tsunami Information Centre offers tsunami warnings by email from 31 seismic stations and 79 tidal stations around the Pacific. Sign up at this link. It’s a bit jarring to get an email with the subject “tsunami warning”, but nice to know it works. Hosted by the U.S. National Weather Center‘s Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre, the system is administered by the ITSU/Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission. These are the member states. Note: there’s also a warning system for the Indian Ocean and for the Atlantic/Mediterranean.

Relief Information System for Earthquakes: Pakistan is a collaborative village-by-village database of needs and conditions in hard-to-reach placeswhat is a “tehsil”?) after the October 2005 earthquake. The key to recovery: restoring the markets people depend on for food, medicine, tin sheeting and clothes.

The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction and the Belgian Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters report that 360 natural disasters in 2005 (an average of one each day) caused US$160 billion in damage; Hurricane Katrina damage was 78% ($125 billion) of that amount. This is the summary: more people were affected by more disasters, but there were fewer deaths. Here are the report’s graphics.