Editorial | Earthquake preparedness

Should anyone have forgotten, there have been plenty of recent reminders that Jamaica, in common with the rest of the Caribbean, resides in an earthquake neighbourhood. But the country, it seems, remains largely complacent about it.

There has been no obviously special effort over the past month despite the prompts to advance earthquake awareness or to mobilise Jamaicans – without frightening them – for what experts say will be the inevitable big event. The situation requires that the Jamaican authorities, especially the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM), urgently review their earthquake education and preparedness strategy.

As is widely known, and as Shonel Dwyer of the National Commission on Science and Technology reminded us in her article in this newspaper on Sunday, the Caribbean exists on an especially troublesome bit of tectonic plate. The Caribbean Plate, on which the region sits, is a minor plate bordering the major North American and South American plates. And the area is riddled with faults, which causes the region to be susceptible to seismic activity as the minor plate upon which it resides is squeezed between the two big ones.

With respect to Jamaica, it and Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) are in the relatively unique geographic position of straddling the Caribbean Plate and another minor plate, the Gonave Microplate, one of four microplates that are subject to buffeting and pressures of the North American and South American plates. Or as Dwyer explained it: “The shear of the North American Plate sliding to the west, and our inability to get past it, has produced mounting tectonic stress in our respective geological provinces.”

Luckily for Jamaica, these tectonic stresses have not, for more than 100 years – not since the estimated 9.5 magnitude event of 1907 that killed more than 1,000 people – produced the giant earthquake for which geologists have for decades warned Jamaica to be prepared.

DON’T GET WARNINGS

Unlike with, say, weather forecasting, the science around earthquakes is not where scientists can definitively predict when an activity deep within Earth’s core will happen, resulting in a massive tremor. In other words, people do not get the warnings they expect when storms approach.

You prepare for earthquakes by knowing what to do when they occur; and by designing buildings and infrastructure to make them as resilient as possible to violent movement. And while this is not pure science based on precise data, this newspaper would add that you pay attention to events.

Regarding the latter, Jamaica, given recent developments, has no basis for complacency.

In 2020 and 2021, a pair of earthquakes in the sea off the island measured over seven on the Richter scale. But they did not cause the level of apprehension of the 5.6- magnitude tremor that occurred on land, south of the town of Buff Bay in northeastern Jamaica, on October 30. The quake caused relatively little damage and no injuries. Panicked people, however, rushed from buildings.

Surprisingly, it took the ODPEM, the agency of disaster-management professionals, more than five hours to directly address Jamaicans about the earthquake. It left the public statements to the political executive, who, the agency implied, it was too busy briefing to talk to the public.

On that same day, Jamaica recorded three other earthquakes, the strongest of which was magnitude 4.1. This was followed by a 4.2-magnitude event on November 28.

However, it is not only Jamaica, in this neighbourhood, that has been feeling the stresses from active tectonic plates. There have been several events in the Eastern Caribbean, including a series of earthquakes on Saturday in the vicinity of the islands of Antigua and Barbuda, Montserrat and Guadeloupe in the Leeward Islands chain, as well as around St Vincent and the Grenadines, St Lucia,, and Grenada in the Windward group. The six quakes ranged in magnitude from 3.6 in the Windward cluster to six in Guadeloupe.

SUFFICIENT TO CONCENTRATE MINDS

Wherever you are in the Caribbean, last weekend’s cluster of events, and the fact of several other notable quakes, ought to be sufficient to concentrate minds.

Perhaps much more is happening than meets the eye. But from the perspective of this newspaper, there has not been from the ODPEM, since the October 30 event, any robust public education campaign around earthquake preparation and responses as would be expected. There is no sense or urgency.

Neither has there been any signal of an engineering assessment of the island’s buildings, especially of the new mid- and high-rise structures approved in recent year and the government-increased density levels for new construction. Unfortunately, as has emerged in a few court cases and investigations by the anti-corruption agencies, regulators were not always robust in ensuring that developers followed the rules.

Further, while the current building law was passed, only in 2018, it would also make sense to review it to determine whether it remains fit for purpose, given that, in the face of the new density rules, developers are building higher than in the past.