Taiwan’s resilience, readiness lauded after major earthquake

FORUM Staff

Decades of robust planning and preparedness enabled Taiwan to limit the devastation from a 7.4 magnitude earthquake in April 2024, the most powerful temblor to shake the island in a generation, experts and officials say.

The quake, which was centered about 18 kilometers from Hualien on Taiwan’s east coast, was followed by a rippling of aftershocks, including one measured at 6.4 magnitude, and prompted a tsunami warning, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

A week after the April 3 quake, at least 16 people had been reported dead and more than 1,000 others injured, “with strict building codes and widespread disaster readiness credited with averting an even bigger catastrophe,” the Singapore-based CNA news network reported.

“The concept of building design, essentially, is that we remain intact during small earthquakes, repairable after moderate ones and withstand major earthquakes without collapsing,” Teng Tzu-yu, chief of Hualien’s Economic Affairs Department, told The Wall Street Journal newspaper.

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen said the central authorities were “fully committed and working closely with local governments to implement post-disaster recovery and revitalization plans at the fastest speed.”

Earthquakes of magnitude 7, which are considered major quakes capable of widespread, heavy damage, happen occasionally in Taiwan, according to the USGS. The democratically governed island of 24 million people — a global hub for semiconductor manufacturing — is along the so-called Ring of Fire, a 40,000-kilometer-long belt of seismic instability that encompasses 75% of Earth’s volcanoes and produces 90% of its earthquakes. The eastern portion of the island sits atop a tectonic plate boundary and several tectonic faults.

The April quake was the biggest to hit the island since a 7.7 magnitude earthquake killed an estimated 2,400 people, injured 10,000 others and displaced more than 100,000 residents in 1999. Experts credit Taiwan’s comprehensive resilience-building initiatives after that natural disaster with reducing fatalities and infrastructure damage in the recent quake, as well as with lessening disruption to schools, businesses and other societal functions.

“What we’re seeing here is a combination of a ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ governance culture that has kept the death toll relatively low,” said Daniel Aldrich, director of Northeastern University’s Security and Resilience Program and co-director of its Global Resilience Institute. “The government has long recognized the threat from seismic risks and invested in a variety of measures like, for example, very strict building codes.”

Public awareness also is key.

“You see many people, for example, in evacuation shelters. It’s clear they knew where to go,” Aldrich told the U.S.-based university’s Northeastern Global News. “You don’t see people trying to go back and get items out of very dangerously balanced buildings or partially collapsed buildings. They trusted the information that they were getting from the government, and they worked with their neighbors collectively to try and help and save people. So that combination of a top-down governance structure, which takes disaster risk seriously, and the bottom-up structure has created an outcome for Taiwan that is just incredible.”

Taipei’s commitment to rigorous building standards drew admiration even in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which claims the self-governed island as its territory and threatens to annex it by force. Social media users in the PRC, where inferior construction and lax regulation have been blamed for increasing deaths and injuries during earthquakes and other natural disasters, commented approvingly on videos of buildings in Taiwan swaying but not collapsing during the April temblor, The Wall Street Journal reported.

“Taiwan’s earthquake preparedness is among the most advanced in the world,” Stephen Gao, a seismologist and professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology, told The Associated Press. “These measures have significantly enhanced Taiwan’s resilience to earthquakes, helping to mitigate the potential for catastrophic damage and loss of life.”