Taiwan is unaffected by a massive earthquake

Taiwanese response to Wednesday’s quake: a lesson learned from the first 2024 earthquake and its impact on Taiwan’s infrastructure

Taiwan is vulnerable to earthquakes because it is located in a region with a lot of earthquakes, says an Australian seismologist. The east coast of the island is on top of the Philippine Sea and Eurasian plates. Many of the earthquakes that occur on the eastern side of Taiwan are due to the Philippine Sea plate sliding underneath the Eurasian plate, says Miller.

Stronger tremors can be produced by earthquakes that occur closer to the Earth’s surface. The warnings were initially issued in Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines. A 30-centimetre-high wave rolled into Yonaguni Island in the south of Japan about 15 minutes after the tremor. The earthquake’s effects were also reportedly felt in parts of mainland China.

In Hualien, a low-lying city on Taiwan’s east coast close to the epicenter of Wednesday’s earthquake, residents had largely returned to life as normal, and fewer than 100 buildings were damaged or destroyed during the earthquake, city authorities said.

Most residents are talking about how much worse the earthquake would have been if it happened in other parts of the world.

As of Thursday local time, authorities say nine people were killed during the quake and just over 1,000 people were injured. Train service through the epicenter was restored within 24 hours.

“It is quite remarkable that given an earthquake of this magnitude, we have seen so few reported causalities,” says Daniel Aldrich, a political science professor at Northeastern University who studies earthquake resilience around the world. While India and Haiti faced less powerful earthquakes, Taiwan and Haiti only have a few casualties.

Taiwan reorganized its disaster response at that time and began to make a number of attempts at bottom up and top up responses to shocks. “What we’re seeing in 2024 is a direct outcome of the previous response and governmental criticism.”

Taiwan earthquakes offer a learning experience. Following a deadly 2016 earthquake, engineers discovered that a collapsed high-rise building had used faulty designs that favored big, open lobbies. Such designs left its bases weak, which were in part to blame for the higher number of fatalities and collapses.

Since then, we have upgraded our infrastructure, including pillars and thickening walls, according to an NPR interview with a civil engineer.

Among the updated codes are more robust steel rebar designs embedded in reinforced concrete, strengthening building foundations, and staging regular earthquake drills among the general public.

“The most important the task that we have done is the retrofit for the whole schools,” says Kuo-Fong Ma, a research fellow and seismologist at the Academia Sinica in Taipei.

The team saw how newer or updated infrastructure and retrofits did better during an earthquake than older non-retrofitted buildings did.

A damaged, multi-story building in the center of the city listed to its side while city workers piled a huge mound of dirt in front to prop the building up before they demolish it later this week. There were 24 people rescued from the building on Wednesday. The buildings around it remained intact.