Seis­mol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) Seis­mic Re­search Cen­tre, Dr Joan Lutch­man, has con­firmed that the two earth­quakes which hit Trinidad and To­ba­go on Mon­day night were linked to Au­gust's 6.9 mag­ni­tude earth­quake.

The first earth­quake was felt at 11.33 pm, mea­sured 5.1 and was lo­cat­ed at a depth 10 km and was felt 88 km west south-west of Port-of-Spain and 91 km west north-west of San Fer­nan­do.

UWI's SRC said the sec­ond quake, which oc­curred four min­utes lat­er, had a mag­ni­tude of 4.2 and was al­so lo­cat­ed at a depth of 10 km.

There was no loss of prop­er­ty or dam­age record­ed fol­low­ing Mon­day's earth­quakes.

Speak­ing to the T&T Guardian in a tele­phone in­ter­view a few mo­ments ago, Lutch­man said the lat­est earth­quakes, which mea­sured 5.1 and 4.2 in mag­ni­tudes, were re­lat­ed but were not af­ter­shocks of the Au­gust 21 earth­quake. She ex­plained that the re­cent earth­quakes oc­curred be­cause of the set­tling of the ac­tive earth­quake zone in the Gulf of Paria.

Asked whether the two earth­quakes were ear­ly signs of the an­tic­i­pat­ed mega-quake pre­dict­ed for this re­gion, Lutch­man re­spond­ed, "No. At this time, we would not say that, even though we are cer­tain we are due for a big earth­quake soon." The Caribbean re­gion has not record­ed a mega-quake since 1766 and seis­mol­o­gists say one is due.

Lutch­man said af­ter the Au­gust 21 earth­quake, 60-plus af­ter­shocks were record­ed by the UWI Seis­mic Cen­tre. The strongest of these was 6.1 in mag­ni­tude on Au­gust 22.

"Un­like when we have shal­low earth­quakes, the af­ter­shocks come in. We ex­pect that in a case like this, as the zone set­tles we would see the big­ger earth­quakes over a longer time­frame," she ex­plained.

Say­ing the en­tire Gulf of Paria zone has been ac­tive since Jan­u­ary, Lutch­man not­ed, "The earth­quakes from Mon­day are not in the same zone as the last one so I would not say they are af­ter­shocks. They have oc­curred as a re­sult to the area set­tling. The en­tire Gulf of Paria zone has been busy. On Jan­u­ary 26 we had a num­ber of these Gulf of Paria earth­quakes not where the big one oc­curred on Au­gust 21."

She said the en­tire Caribbean re­gion was in a pe­ri­od of ac­tiv­i­ty.

In prepa­ra­tion for the mega earth­quake which is due to hit, Lutch­man said the Gov­ern­ment must be­gin to do a crit­i­cal as­sess­ment of all in­fra­struc­ture. She al­so said the home­own­ers must al­so put sys­tems in place to se­cure their homes.

Mean­while, past pres­i­dent of the Na­tion­al Build­ing Code Com­mit­tee Shyankaran Lal­la al­so said pre­ven­ta­tive mea­sures must be tak­en to safe­guard lives in the event of a mega earth­quake.

"I want to call on the Gov­ern­ment to give se­ri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion for the crit­i­cal as­sess­ment of our in­fra­struc­ture so we can pri­ori­tise ar­eas of need and de­vel­op ac­cord­ing­ly. I want to re­mind the Gov­ern­ment that this coun­try has no legal­ly en­forced build­ing codes and I once again call for the adop­tion of the (In­ter­na­tion­al Code Coun­cil) ICC codes," he said.

Lal­la al­so said there must be en­force­ment of spec­i­fi­ca­tions when build­ing is done in flood-prone ar­eas.