Un arquitecto chileno afirma que “el comportamiento de las construcciones contemporáneas ante los terremotos ha sido bueno”
Chilean architect says "the performance of contemporary buildings in the face of earthquakes has been good
Juan Ignacio Baixas, who gave a lecture at lecture at the University of Navarra, proposes increasing quality control standards in new buildings.
"With few exceptions, in Chile, the behavior of the contemporary and standardized Structures in the face of the earthquake has been good". This was stated by the director of the School of Architecture of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC), Juan Ignacio Baixas, at the University of Navarra.
In this sense, he explained that those buildings that have had a structural calculation study have not suffered major damage and are repairable. "Among the multi-story buildings," he said, "only one collapsed causing loss of life. The rest of the damaged blocks allowed their inhabitants to leave them, although about 20 will not be repaired".
The Chilean architect, who gave a lecture organized by the School of Architecture of the academic center, works actively, through the School he directs, in the assessment of the damages caused by the earthquakes and the tsunami in Chile: "Regarding the main earthquake, the great damage has occurred in old constructions -many of them made of adobe- and in spontaneous constructions that are illegal. More than 100,000 have been seriously damaged".
Juan Ignacio Baixas also offered some guidelines for action that could mitigate the effects of this phenomenon on future occasions: "We can improve by tightening quality control systems in new constructions to further reduce failures in standard buildings" and added that "it is important to continue working along these lines, since since objective measurements of seismic activity have been available, Chile has suffered two of the five strongest earthquakes on record".
Identify risk areas and early warning systems
The expert emphasized the importance of differentiating between earthquake and tsunami: "Despite being two clearly different phenomena, unfortunately they are confused in the statistics, which is not good when it comes to drawing conclusions". In this sense, he pointed out that "the tsunami that devastated a wide area of the coast produced greater destruction and loss of life than the earthquake".
With respect to possible measures that could be taken to prevent major damage in the event of another tsunami, he concluded: "It would be more a matter of identifying risk zones and rapid warning and evacuation systems, since building Structures to withstand them would be very expensive and, with a frequency of 200 years for each zone, would not justify their construction and no one would be willing to pay for them".