An­na-Lisa Paul

While there has been one re­port­ed ca­su­al­ty record­ed thus far as a re­sult of the mag­ni­tude 6.8 earth­quake which struck the south­east­ern part of Tai­wan yes­ter­day–a T&T na­tion­al liv­ing in the cap­i­tal city of Taipei cred­it­ed their lev­el of pre­pared­ness in re­sponse to dis­as­ters as the main rea­son be­hind it.

The strong tremor which caused train car­riages to be­come de­railed; while an apart­ment build­ing col­lapsed; and hun­dreds were trapped along moun­tain roads– fol­lowed a 6.4 mag­ni­tude earth­quake on Sat­ur­day evening in the same area, which al­so caused no ca­su­al­ties.

In a Zoom in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia on Sun­day, foot­ball coach Wayne Shep­pard said he had been ly­ing on the bed in his third-floor apart­ment when the earth­quake oc­curred.

He re­called, “The earth­quake to­day (yes­ter­day) was very strong.”

“The walls were creak­ing and the en­tire build­ing was shak­ing,” he added.

Re­fer­ring to Sat­ur­day’s earth­quake, he said while that one was al­so strong, it did not last as long as yes­ter­day’s.

The US Ge­o­log­i­cal Sur­vey mea­sured Sun­day’s quake at a mag­ni­tude 7.2 and at a depth of 10 km or six miles.

Tai­wan’s fire de­part­ment res­cued four peo­ple from the apart­ment build­ing which house a con­ve­nience store that col­lapsed in Yuli, while three peo­ple whose ve­hi­cle fell off a dam­aged bridge were res­cued and tak­en to hos­pi­tal.

The Tai­wan Rail­ways Ad­min­is­tra­tion said six car­riages came off the rails at Dongli sta­tion in east­ern Tai­wan, af­ter part of the plat­form canopy col­lapsed, but the fire de­part­ment said there were no in­juries.

More than 600 peo­ple were trapped on the scenic Chike and Liushishi moun­tain ar­eas by blocked roads, though there were no in­juries.

The US Pa­cif­ic Tsuna­mi Warn­ing Cen­ter is­sued a warn­ing for Tai­wan af­ter the tremor but lat­er lift­ed the alert.

Shep­pard, who has been in Tai­wan on a coach­ing con­tract since May 2021, is due to re­turn to T&T when the sea­son clos­es at the end of De­cem­ber.

Com­ment­ing on the build­ing codes in Tai­wan which had changed since the 1990’s, to en­sure res­i­den­tial and com­mer­cial prop­er­ties were as earth­quake re­sis­tant as pos­si­ble, he said added: “In terms of sys­tems be­ing in place, there is a warn­ing sys­tem that ac­tu­al­ly alerts you of an im­pend­ing earth­quake.”

He said sen­sors buried in the earth usu­al­ly trig­gered alarms and ini­ti­at­ed mo­bile alerts so cit­i­zens do have a short win­dow of op­por­tu­ni­ty to pre­pare and take ac­tion to pro­tect them­selves.

Shep­pard said he did not re­ceive any alerts in re­la­tion to the two earth­quakes on the week­end.

How­ev­er, he said he had re­ceived such no­ti­fi­ca­tions in the past, which “pre­pares me and puts me in state of know­ing some­thing is go­ing to hap­pen.”

Shep­pard said T&T could learn from Tai­wan which has a very ro­bust alert sys­tem for nat­ur­al dis­as­ters such as ty­phoons, earth­quakes, and even black-outs.

“I think it is time T&T starts to use the tech­nol­o­gy avail­able to make sure cit­i­zens are safe and in­formed,” he con­clud­ed.