About four months from now will be the third anniversary of the earthquake that devastated Haiti. The following paints a picture of what will happen in Trinidad and Tobago if the likely earthquake were to occur today. It will be 3.17pm and there will be no rain in Trinidad or Tobago on that day. The epicenter of the earthquake will be in the region between Trinidad and Tobago but closer to Trinidad, with Richter magnitude 6.9 and at a depth of 14 km.
This will generate a movement of the ground that will peak at between 6 and 3 meters per second squared, anywhere on land in Trinidad and Tobago. You will be at work, beginning to wind down the day's affairs and looking forward to reaching home to enjoy its remains. You will feel a large slam-wham! that will throw you off your chair and the lights will flicker.
One point five seconds later there will be another large jolt and as you lie on the floor, and the leg of your table will hit hard against your ribs. The lights will go out and the floor will shudder violently left and right and rise and fall as you and everything in the room are thrown around, and all that can fall down, will-the ceiling tiles, the fluorescent light tubes and their pans and wires, the half wall-length of glass on the side of your office overlooking the street outside, and the block wall on the other half, both falling into the street outside. Most of the remaining walls in the office will fall, and a block will fall directly onto your ankle but you are lucky as it is not broken.
All of this you will hear but not see, except for the little due to the sparking of the dangling wires as they touch randomly, and the sound will not be like anything you have ever heard before. It will sound like thunder mixed with a steel drum roller slowly pulverising block and glass, like the ones used to compact hot asphalt in the street, and a deep hum like the wailing of transformers at an electrical substation, and interspersed with several nearby and distant crashing sounds.
But this composite, wild auditory feast will vary in intensity from consistently present, to seeming as if inside your head. All of this, with its erratic phases of groups of vibrations will happen for one hundred and five seconds. It will feel much longer than that.
It will never quite stop shaking, at least for the first six hours after the main event. Some of it will be real, and some of it will just be your shaking which will continue for days. It will be weeks before you are able to sleep indoors again, even if the building is the strongest possible.
You are covered in ceiling tiles and manage to push them off. You rise slowly, tentatively, and crouched. The fallen walls allow light into the office but you can see almost nothing through the haze of dust that you soon discover you are totally covered with. The dust is everywhere-inside and outside the building, and you cough deeply as you try to brush it off of you, some of it gets into your eyes temporarily blinding you. And you panic. Soon the dust is flushed away but you sob uncontrollably, not knowing what to do, so far not having moved one step from where you first rose.
Eventually, sufficient composure returns and you evaluate if you should go to the light-the outside of the building where the wall fell out, or for the dark stairs which is just two flights between you and the street outside. You head for the stairs, not because of presence of mind, but out of habit. As you make your first steps you recall your damaged ankle and again panic ensues and you cry. After calming yourself down you continue for the stairs.
Now however, you hear the moans and bawling of people in the building and people outside in the street. Hobbling to the stairs you have acquired some confidence but now the self-preservation instinct takes over and you suppress the urge to help-a decision that will haunt you with the dread of spiritual guilt for a long, long time.
Finally, you are in the street and there is still a lot of dust in the atmosphere but you can see well enough, the carnage in the city-the street is covered with mounds of block and glass walls that have escaped from their buildings, and toothpicks of downed electrical poles and lines, and there are people and vehicles buried below who were merely passing by at the time. The sight, the confusion, is horrendous. Your mobile phone was on the desk, but of what use will it be anyway?
All that is on your mind now is to reach home-mama, grandpa, the children, the house! You live on the outskirts of the city and home is usually 30 minutes walk away. Your determination and resolve strengthen as you remind yourself of your family's and friend's needs and you push on. You make it in just under five hours and why-the route is almost impassible due to the extent and distribution of debris so you have to climb over and skirt around, cautiously avoiding the power lines scattered all over, and sometimes having to enter near-collapsed buildings to do so, some of which are ablaze.
That was three weeks ago. The neighbours have banded together and are sharing whatever they have as the closest shelters did not make it. Neither did grandpa, a niece, and the house. You are getting news indirectly from someone with a shortwave radio. The government agencies have not arrived yet, the debris in the streets, collapsed bridges, culverts, and roads, mar their way.
Anyone who could not walk home after the earthquake had to stay wherever they were and await the arrival of the army, who in turn had to await foreign military assistance, to involuntarily transport them to tent cities that will become their new home for about three months, most of that time knowing nothing of the fate of loved ones at home.
The estimated death toll is 13,472 in Trinidad, and 1,912 in Tobago on the day of the earthquake. In the following one hundred days this will become 22,710 in Trinidad, and 7,105 in Tobago due to lack of sufficient facilities to cater for the injured. Sixty-one per cent of all housing in Trinidad and Tobago will collapse or be damaged beyond usability, likewise 53 percent of all non-residential buildings, and 85 per cent of all bridges.
There will be no public water supply for 18 months. The recovery cost will be estimated as US$352 billion dollars (excluding housing and the industrial estates) and recovery time as 22 years, though about 25 per cent of Trinidad and Tobago will never be the same.
This article was written on our Jubilee Independence Day anniversary, a day to be remembered with pride for what has been achieved in 50 years. Yet given this hypothetical scenario, all can be erased in 105 seconds, turning back our developmental status in time to at least 50 years before our independence. And all that is needed to avert this disaster is some relatively minor expenditure on seismic structural retrofitting-the best method of earthquake disaster mitigation.
The painted scenario is not hyperbole-the earthquake will come, and sooner than we think, maybe next week, maybe the first quarter of 2013, and if we continue as we are, it will be as described. The University of the West Indies will be training engineers from industry in the comprehensive seismic retrofitting of buildings (ie assessment and design), a more complex activity than what is required for new buildings. This training will be conducted over a period of three months, and begins in a few days. However much more is required, and on a national scale.
Richard Clarke
Head and Lecturer,
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
The University of the West Indies