How prepared is Metro Manila for an earthquake? Really?

On 28 March, a 7.7 magnitude earthquake hit Myanmar. As it stands, it has claimed over 3,600 lives and injured over 5,000 people. Its destruction is so great that it has prompted the United Nations and its partners to offer over $240 million as humanitarian aid.

If a similar earthquake hits the Philippines, we will have the same or even worse results, as evidenced in 2004, when the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) conducted various earthquake disaster scenarios in Metro Manila. Their most damning model has over 40 percent of residential buildings to be heavily damaged and will cause over 34,000 deaths and one million injuries. These are caused by the many active fault lines that run through our country, with The West Valley Fault line being the most notorious. If we wish to mitigate this disastrous outcome, we must act now. Below are my three suggestions on this topic.

Improving access to public evacuation space

Each person would need roughly 3.5 square meters of evacuation space during a disaster. Metro Manila alone would need over 57 million square meters of evacuation space, which are mostly relegated to public parks. While you can see many greeneries in Google Maps, many are in private golf courses or parks within exclusive subdivisions. Both of these are closed to the general public. Suffice it to say that in large-scale natural disasters, the local government should have access to these spaces to allow temporary evacuation, as the evacuation centers that our government utilizes (basketball courts, stadiums) will be insufficient.

We must consider public health and safety when planning and designing our cities. In addition to serving as evacuation spaces, we have already seen how beneficial public parks and spaces can be when Covid-19 arrived in 2020. These public spaces were temporary evacuation centers and makeshift hospitals for the infected. Without them, our hospitals would have imploded from overcapacity.

Improving the structural integrity of our buildings

According to the JICA report, the collapse of buildings is due to our current infrastructure having poor structural integrity and not being earthquake-proof. Many of our low-rise to mid-rise buildings would be more prone to either damage or full collapse. While the Philippines has a dedicated National Structural Code to address earthquake resistance of buildings, this is easier said than done, as retrofitting current buildings is costly. We must also add fireproofing strategies to new and current buildings, as building collapse is the primary source of fire breakouts. Moving forward, new design standards addressing these issues should be mandatory in many of our low-rise infrastructures, especially our low-cost housing projects. Giving incentives like tax rebates can help developers comply with these new standards.

Improving our transport lines

JICA’s disaster model predicted that many of our bridges over the Pasig and Marikina rivers would be subject to liquefaction, making our transportation non-functional. For us to have a conducive aid response and recovery, it is essential to be able to transport goods, services, and people to and from the disaster-stricken areas. The transformation of our transportation infrastructure and lifelines to be earthquake-resistant must happen immediately to have a chance to recover swiftly. Additionally, each local government unit (LGU) must collaborate with its neighbor to ensure transport lines from one city to another are accessible. We can’t do this alone.

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Romeo is a Filipino architect helping shape the building typologies of New York City for almost a decade. He likes to share his insights on urban planning, architecture, and the city’s culture whenever possible.