Govt errs in quake safety

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Tue, 04/15/2008 11:40 AM

The Indonesian government has missed a golden opportunity to address the safety of buildings susceptible to earthquakes, an engineering expert said Monday.

Teddy Boen, a senior advisor for the World Seismic Safety Initiative, said awareness of the risks of earthquakes had been high due to repeated disastrous earthquakes in the past few years, which would have made earthquake-related programs easy to implement.

"While public awareness about the seismic risks was still there, the government didn't use that golden opportunity to start implementing programs concerning the safety of buildings when shaken by earthquakes," Teddy told The Jakarta Post after speaking at the International Conference on Earthquake Engineering and Disaster Mitigation in Jakarta.

"Like when someone has an accident, that person might want to know how to best react directly after (the experience), not a few years later," he added.

Teddy said that since the tsunami in Aceh almost four years ago and the repeated earthquakes in the last two years, there were no drastic changes in earthquake-related matters, such as the enforcement of seismic-resistant buildings in the country.

"There are also no regulations related to earthquake-resistant buildings. The reconstruction of buildings in Aceh and Yogyakarta, for example, still follow old practices that prevailed prior to the damaging earthquakes," Teddy, considered the founding father of modern earthquake engineering in Indonesia, said.

"Also, until today no requirements have been issued related to the retrofitting of buildings."

That was why, he said, the government should start highlighting the need to make all nonengineered buildings, or simple houses, earthquake-resistant with locally available materials suitable to the local social, cultural, ethnographic and economic conditions.

"Basically, these activities can be carried out by homeowners with minimal financial and technical assistance, and do not require extensive reconstruction or modification of the existing building," Teddy said.

"The government should also enact a national housing policy which recognizes the role of nonengineered buildings, supports activities to improve this type of housing and develops a public awareness concerning this," he added.

He also suggested the government establish an agency to serve as a coordinator for housing improvement activities.

Teddy said many engineers considered nonengineered buildings to be too simple for them, when actually they didn't have the ability to make structural analyses for nonengineered houses.

"The fact is, many of them have already forgotten about the correct way of laying bricks, mixing concrete and preparing correct reinforcing detailing for seismic resistance.

"This unfortunately resulted in the poor quality of the houses built so far in Aceh and Nias that were supervised by engineers and architects who were supposed to have the very basic skills (to make the buildings) earthquake-resistant," he said. (dia)

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