Quake, Tijuana: A Devastating Mix

This city’s rampant growth and lack of disaster planning make it vulnerable to thousands of deaths and injuries in an earthquake, a seismic expert says.

“If there is an earthquake here, even moderate, there is going to be a disaster,” Haresh C. Shah, a Stanford University engineering professor, said this week during a United Nations-sponsored conference on disaster planning in nine developing countries.

Tijuana, a city of 1.3 million that borders San Diego, has not had a major earthquake in its 110-year history, but the La Nacion fault runs beneath the city.

Mexican officials paid $50,000 to match a U.N. grant and participate in a disaster planning study so they could devise a plan for Tijuana.

“Tijuana showed tremendous determination to do something on their own,” said Shah, director of the World Seismic Safety Initiative, a nonprofit group that promotes earthquake awareness.

The research was part of a U.N. program, known by its acronym RADIUS, that was created in 1996 as a way to reduce the effects of earthquakes in the urban areas of poor countries.

During the four-day conference, studies were also presented on the earthquake readiness of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Antofagasta, Chile; Bandung, Indonesia; Guayaquil, Ecuador; Izmir, Turkey; Tashkent, Uzbekistan; Skopje, Macedonia; and Zigong, China.

Though much scientific knowledge about the effects of earthquakes is available, it often does not get translated into practical terms to allow communities to plan, said RADIUS project manager Kenji Okazaki.

However, the United Nations honored a leading Turkish geological scientist Wednesday for his work in helping reduce the effects of severe earthquakes, such as the one that devastated his nation in August.

The Tijuana study focused on the scenario of a 6.5-magnitude earthquake along the La Nacion fault.

Such a disaster could kill as many as 18,000, injure 45,000 and leave 250,000 homeless, said Antonio Rosquillas, the city’s civil protection chief.

Researchers looked at Tijuana’s infrastructure, emergency services, telephone and electric services and delivery of water. Their conclusion was that Mexican officials must upgrade and enforce construction codes, and create greater public awareness about disaster readiness.

Rosquillas said the city plans to “take more concrete actions.”