an you still consider the Philippines as a safe zone even if there are a lot of earthquakes?

Philip Rabe

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I'm Californian. I've lived through two big earthquakes. 4y

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Can you still consider the Philippines as a safe zone even if there are a lot of earthquakes?

I was in Palo, Leyte in 1998, but some of the trip was in Tacloban City, some was up in Manila and some up north. I would study the local fault lines, and locate 100 km or more from them and be 100+m (300′) above sea level. That avoids tsunami and Epicenter damages. And the brutally hot humid weather of the lowlands. So as much as much as that is possible anywhere,that would be my plan.

Volcanoes. Don’t live near them. Anywhere near. I forget the radius of Pinatubo’s destruction… Oh. Wow.

While we’re there, climate change folks take note:

In Tacloban I saw a pretty common sight: A partially completed building with an occupied and bustling street level business and one or two living units above. Above that, partially formed concrete columns reached part of their designed height, stopping wherever the days concrete supply ran out. The rest was rebar. Rusting and pointing skyward. Waiting for work to start again one day.

When work would continue, it would create both a cold joint in the concrete, and one that already has well established rust. So that’s bad from a seismic performance point of view. And for long term building performance, as we recently saw in the Surfside, Florida condo collapse.

Earthquake resistant structures need to withstand well enough that if seriously damaged, people can still escape when all the movements settle down, and hopefully nothing deadly will fall off the structure while it’s shaking.

Besides holding up against lateral ground movements forward and back, left to right, buildings need to resist vertical accelerations up and down. There needs to be very strong steel connections between the roof and all of it’s parts, to the walls which need to be connected to each other, And to the ground by steel bolts. Hopefully set into a big wet pour of a monolithic foundation system. With enough clean reinforcing steel to be rigid enough to keep its shape as earthquake ground waves distort the earthen grade level around and beneath the foundations. That can end up with a lopsided building afterwards, but it won’t turn into a deadly house of cards crushing people in or outside of it.

A big source of fatal injuries in the Kobe disaster was falling roof tiles. In the Beirut blast, falling building cladding and plain, untempered plate glass.