RHON­DA RAM­BAL­LY

Japan-some­times re­ferred to as 'The Land of the Ris­ing Sun' is now reel­ing from the dev­as­ta­tion caused by an earth­quake with a mag­ni­tude of 8.9 which trig­gered a tsuna­mi as high as ten me­tres sweep­ing the north-east­ern coast­line. On­ly two days be­fore, there was a 7.2-mag­ni­tude quake in the re­gion. Seis­mol­o­gist Dr Joan Latch­man of the Seis­mic Re­search Cen­tre in St Au­gus­tine said the earth­quake was 900 times big­ger than the one which struck Haiti in Jan­u­ary last year. The death toll has been record­ed in the hun­dreds with hun­dreds more miss­ing. On­line re­ports state that in 1923 Japan ex­pe­ri­enced an 8.3 quake in Kan­to which killed close to 140,000 peo­ple. An­oth­er quake in Kobe in 1995 killed close to 6,500.

An earth­quake which oc­curred in 1993, caused a tsuna­mi off the coast of Hokkai­do and 202 peo­ple were killed. Japan's pop­u­la­tion is es­ti­mat­ed 127.3 mil­lion. Latch­man said while there were no warn­ings for an earth­quake, peo­ple should still take pre­cau­tion. She said Trinida­di­ans tend­ed not to take warn­ings se­ri­ous­ly and usu­al­ly for­get about events af­ter a few days have gone by. Latch­man said it was im­por­tant to con­tin­u­ous­ly is­sue warn­ings in or­der to be pre­pared. "We have been sound­ing this warn­ing for a long time and peo­ple prob­a­bly get tired of us say­ing it, but one day we are go­ing to get a very large earth­quake in our re­gion and we need to pre­pare," she said in an in­ter­view yes­ter­day. She said T&T does not have leg­is­la­tion on build­ing codes which could as­sist peo­ple in con­struct­ing earth­quake re­sis­tant struc­tures.

She said an earth­quake with such mag­ni­tude could take many decades to oc­cur. "We can't say a date and time, but the ac­tiv­i­ty in the earth's crust is con­tin­u­ing," Latch­man said. She said T&T need­ed to en­sure mea­sures were put in place should an earth­quake oc­cur. Latch­man said erect­ing earth­quake re­sis­tant hos­pi­tals and schools and hav­ing a build­ing code to fol­low could serve as dam­age con­trol.

"There are a num­ber of things we can do so­cial­ly and in­di­vid­u­al­ly. Hav­ing wa­ter sys­tems that are ro­bust and en­sur­ing we have first aid sup­plies in our homes are sim­ple steps we can take," she said. Mean­while, di­rec­tor of the Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal Of­fice of T&T Em­manuel Moolchan, said while Japan had per­haps one of the best warn­ing sys­tems for a tsuna­mi, the de­struc­tion could not have been pre­vent­ed.