S. KOREA: Seoul Unprepared for Earthquakes

01-19-2010 21:51

By Park Si-soo, Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporters

Nearly nine out of 10 commercial and residential buildings in Seoul were built without earthquake-resistant technology, a recent research showed Tuesday.

According to research conducted by Seoul City, only 6,100 out of 628,000 buildings in the metropolitan city with 12 million people are resistant to an earthquake whose magnitude is tantamount to the one that virtually devastated Haiti last week, leaving huge numbers of casualties.

Only six percent of buildings in central Seoul, including Yongsan and Jongno, were designed with quake-resistant technology, while nearly 20 percent of buildings in southern Seoul, including Gangnam and Seocho were built to withstand major tremors, the research said.

Meanwhile, a state institute said Monday Korea is not safe from earthquakes such as the one that struck Haiti, calling for swifter emergency measures against the natural disaster.

An earthquake with a magnitude of 7 in a small part of a metropolitan area could kill more than 50,000 people, injure more than 620,000, and tear down 929,000 buildings nationwide, according to the National Emergency Management Agency.

Researchers used a computer to simulate an earthquake on a southwestern part of Seoul and found that the death toll would mark 419,746 in Seoul; 45,364 in Incheon; 199 in South Chungcheong; 73 in North Chungcheong; and 65 in Gangwon. Other southern areas would not be affected harshly, it said. Among 6.6 million buildings registered nationwide, 929,230 would be destroyed or severely damaged, it said, stressing the immense effect of the possible disaster.

Korea used to be considered relatively immune to the natural disaster for being situated in the center of one of the earth's plates. However, the emergency agency said, "The increase of a single unit in scale could increase the damage by 32 times in real life."

Still, only 18.1 percent of public and large buildings here are built earthquake-proof and less than 13.7 percent of schools are resistant to the phenomenon, as of 2008 and 2007, respectively.

The government adopted a contingency plan in 2008, which includes early alarm systems that take effect within 50 seconds from detection. The researchers called for more support in construction or the remodeling of non-earthquake-proof buildings.

According to the Korea Meteorological Administration, there have been about 60 earthquakes reported on the Korean peninsula in 2009, the largest number in 31 years of recording.

However, people shouldn't be too alarmed, the weather agency said. Most of them were not even detectable by ordinary people, it said.

"Only eight of them were over a magnitude of 3, a level where people could feel the ground shaking or the vibration," it said in a press release.

View Article in The Korea Times