wild places | wild happenings | wild news
make a difference for our wild places

home | links | search the site
  all articles latest | past | articles by topics | search wildnews
wild news on wildsingapore
  Straits Times 24 Sep 07
No need to quake in fear, location roots S'pore firmly
By Arti Mulchand

EVEN as quakes in nearby Sumatra continue rocking the region, experts here are confident Singapore will stay safe.

And it will be so even if 'The Big One' hits - as geologists expect it to.

They list the factors stacked in Singapore's favour: its location far away from fault lines, the lie of those fault lines, and the strict local building codes.

The two nearest fault lines are 400km and 700km away, so the seismic waves would have weakened by the time they reach Singapore shores.

Add to that the fact that the fault-line 400km away is a 'slip-strike' fault which does not produce large quakes, says Mr Ong Chan Leng, the director of the Building & Construction Authority's Special Functions Division.

It also helps that Singapore is in a seismically-stable zone, sandwiched by the Java trench in the west and south, and the Philippine plate and trench in the east.

Singapore's location, away from the direction of a possible rupture when The Big One hits, also puts it out of harm's way: Model simulations suggest that, in that instance, the waves would likely move north and north-west, away from Singapore.

Professor Kerry Sieh, a geologist from the California Institute of Technology who is on a visiting professorship at the Nanyang Technological University, says that although tremors were felt here during the 2004 Boxing Day quake and the Nias quake the following year, the plates also ruptured away from Singapore.

One thing that did happen here as a result of the recent jolts was that we inched 1cm in the direction of Sumatra.

Experts told The Straits Times that such movements were normal when the earth's plates move.

Prof Sieh says that over the next 100 to 200 years, the island will move back as the plates readjust themselves.

The National Environment Agency's Meteorological Services Division has five seismic monitoring stations in undisclosed locations, three of which now pick up every shift and hiccup in the earth.

The data collected at these stations reveal where and how big the quake is, among other things.

When one that is large enough hits, an alarm is sounded to alert agencies such as the Building and Construction Authority and the Singapore Civil Defence Force.

No Singapore building in recorded history has been damaged by tremors. In fact, the shaking of a building allows it to expend the seismic energy, making it safer.

The experts agree that Singapore is unlikely to experience more than just swaying.

The building codes here add another layer of protection, said Mr Ong.

All buildings here, including older ones and those on reclaimed land, are designed to withstand wind speeds of up to 110kmh or 33m a second.

Mr Ong adds that buildings here are inherently robust.

Prof Sieh shares his optimism, saying: 'From a geological point of view, Singapore is pretty dead.'
links
S'pore tremors raise fear of building on reclaimed land By Koh Gui Qing Reuters 9 Mar 07
Related articles on Singapore: general environmental issues
about the site | email ria
  News articles are reproduced for non-profit educational purposes.
 

website©ria tan 2003 www.wildsingapore.com