Di­rec­tor of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies Seis­mic Re­search Cen­tre Dr Joan Latch­man says the dev­as­ta­tion in Chile, af­ter three ma­jor earth­quakes this week, should serve as a re­minder that T&T must pre­pared for earth­quakes, spe­cial­ly since ac­tive lo­cal earth­quake faults could rup­ture at any time, giv­ing way to large-mag­ni­tude earth­quakes, such as those ex­pe­ri­enced in Chile."Every day brings us clos­er to a day when it could oc­cur wher­ev­er in the East­ern Caribbean. Every day of de­lay is a day lost in our pre­pared­ness and we need to take note of that," Latch­man said.

On April 1, a mag­ni­tude 8.2 quake rocked Chile, killing six peo­ple. It was fol­lowed by al­most 100 af­ter­shocks. A sec­ond earth­quake, of 7.6 mag­ni­tude, oc­curred off the west coast of north­ern Chile on April 3. An earth­quake with mag­ni­tude 6.1 oc­curred near Iquique, Chile, at 1.37 last Fri­day, ac­cord­ing to the US Ge­o­log­i­cal Sur­vey. Latch­man, speak­ing with the T&T Guardian, on Fri­day, said peo­ple need to recog­nise that all the seis­mic ac­tiv­i­ty with­in the re­gion is an in­di­ca­tion that "the earth process­es are alive and well and are con­tin­u­ing as they have al­ways done."

She said while T&T had been for­tu­nate to on­ly ex­pe­ri­ence small earth­quakes, one must re­mem­ber that the coun­try sat on faults ca­pa­ble of cre­at­ing large-mag­ni­tude earth­quakes.

"The faults, that can host those large earth­quakes, are ac­cu­mu­lat­ing that strained en­er­gy, and one day, when they get to their lim­it, they will re­lease it.

"Every mag­ni­tude eight and over earth­quake that hap­pens re­in­forces that point, that the big faults of the East­ern Caribbean, that can host the en­er­gy con­tin­ue to load and one day it will rup­ture," she warned.Latch­man said even though the earth­quakes were of sig­nif­i­cant mag­ni­tude in Chile, many of the build­ings in the coun­try re­sist­ed the force of them. That, she said, could be at­trib­uted to its strict ad­her­ence to and en­force­ment of its build­ing codes, which came out of its his­to­ry of earth­quakes.T&T, she said, had to come to that same po­si­tion.

"We have to recog­nise that our sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment hangs crit­i­cal­ly on our earth­quake pre­pared­ness be­cause the event on­ly has to hap­pen once to set us back decades, and all the in­vest­ment that we have ex­pend­ed to bring our­selves to where we are will be lost in one day. That fact needs to come home to us," Latch­man said.She said T&T was mov­ing in the right di­rec­tion through the es­tab­lish­ment of a Na­tion­al Build­ing Code Com­mit­tee to de­vel­op a build­ing code for all struc­tures.She said it was key that while the code was be­ing for­mu­lat­ed the mech­a­nisms, such as the nec­es­sary leg­is­la­tion, agen­cies for en­force­ment and per­son­nel, are put in place so when the code was com­plet­ed they would be ready to move for­ward.

Latch­man com­mend­ed the Of­fice of Dis­as­ter Pre­pared­ness and Man­age­ment (ODPM) for putting mea­sures in place to en­cour­age earth­quake pre­pared­ness and emer­gency re­sponse.

"Had that mes­sage been heed­ed 40 years ago we would have been in a bet­ter po­si­tion to­day. We have gone on apace with all kinds of de­vel­op­ment, ig­nor­ing the earth­quake haz­ards and now we have to get things in place as fast as pos­si­ble if we hope to have sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment," Latch­man added.