Taiwan emerges remarkably unscathed after devastating earthquakeExBulletin

A police officer stands guard near a partially collapsed building a day after a strong earthquake in Hualien City, eastern Taiwan, Thursday, April 4, 2024. ChiangYing-ying/AP .

. ChiangYing-ying/AP

A police officer stands guard near a partially collapsed building a day after a strong earthquake occurred in Hualien City, eastern Taiwan, Thursday, April 4, 2024.

Xiang Yingying/AP

HUALIN CITY, Taiwan — A massive 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck Taiwan Wednesday morning, swaying bridges and burying mountain roads in landslides.

Vincent Zeng, a resident of Hualien, said: “The road under my feet suddenly turned into something like waves on the water.”

However, the day after the worst earthquake to hit the Asian island in a quarter-century, most residents cannot stop talking about how much worse the situation could have been.

As of Thursday local time, authorities say nine people were killed during the quake and just over 1,000 people were injured. Train service through the epicenter was restored within 24 hours.

“It is striking that given an earthquake of this magnitude, we have had so few reported casualties,” says Daniel Aldrich, a political science professor at Northeastern University who studies earthquake resilience around the world. “India and Haiti experienced less powerful earthquakes but had much higher casualties, and Taiwan was only able to sustain a very small number.”

The last time Taiwan witnessed an earthquake of this size was in 1999, when more than 2,000 people died in a 7.3-magnitude earthquake that struck central Taiwan and more than 100,000 buildings collapsed. Audits conducted after the earthquake found poor building codes and poor-quality materials.

“At that moment, Taiwan reorganized its disaster response and began a number of attempts at bottom-up and top-down responses to shocks,” Aldrich says. “What we see in 2024 is a direct result of previous response and government criticism.”

Over the next 25 years, Taiwan embarked on a campaign to modernize and strengthen existing bridges and buildings so they could withstand more intense seismic waves, while enforcing strict adherence to earthquake-resistant building codes. Much of the housing on the island was built before 1999.

“We have upgraded our infrastructure a lot since then, including thickening the walls and adding columns,” Cheng Ruoxi, a civil engineer with the Hualian municipal government, told NPR on Thursday.

Taiwan has also set up an earthquake warning system, although the system malfunctioned on Wednesday.

Every earthquake Taiwan has experienced has provided an educational experience. Following a deadly 2016 earthquake, engineers discovered that a collapsed high-rise had used faulty designs that favored large, open atriums. Such designs left their foundations weak, which was partly responsible for the high number of deaths and collapses.

Among the updated rules are stronger designs for steel reinforcing bars embedded in reinforced concrete, strengthening building foundations, and conducting regular earthquake drills among the general public.

Rescue workers are shown searching for potential victims inside the rubble of an apartment that collapsed in a 6.4 magnitude earthquake in the southern Taiwan city of Tainan on February 10, 2016. Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images .

. Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images

Rescue workers are shown searching for possible victims inside the remains of an apartment that collapsed in a 6.4 magnitude earthquake in the southern Taiwan city of Tainan on February 10, 2016.

Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images

“The most important task we have undertaken is to modernize all the schools,” says Ko-Fung Ma, a research fellow and seismologist at Academia Sinica in Taipei.

These measures are extremely important, given Taiwan's familiarity with earthquakes. Each year, the island experiences more than 2,000 small earthquakes annually, although only a small fraction of these are large enough to be noticeable to humans. At least thirty active geological fault lines run beneath Taiwan.

The east coast of the island is particularly vulnerable to earthquakes, because it lies on some of the largest fault lines. A 7.2-magnitude earthquake in September 2022, south of Wednesday's quake near the eastern city of Taitung, killed one person.

“Taiwan has invested a lot of time and resources to make infrastructure more resilient to earthquakes,” says Trevor Carey, a civil engineering professor at the University of British Columbia who traveled to Taiwan after the 2022 earthquakes to assess the damage and learn from it.

“The team saw a lot of things that confirmed that newer or updated infrastructure or retrofits did better during the earthquake, and that older infrastructure that wasn't retrofitted did better.” [buildings] She didn't either.”

In the low-lying city of Hualien on Taiwan's east coast, close to the epicenter of Wednesday's quake, residents have largely returned to life as usual, and fewer than 100 buildings were damaged or destroyed during the quake, city authorities said.

A damaged multi-story building downtown collapsed on its side as city workers piled a huge pile of dirt in front of the building before it was demolished later this week. Rescuers retrieved 24 people from the building on Wednesday. The surrounding buildings remained intact.

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