Locals express a mix of resignation and pluckiness in the face of three devastating temblors during September that affected Mexico City, Morelos, Puebla, Chiapas and Oaxaca — but not Jalisco.
“Whether building codes are being enforced is a very important question,” said Luis Méndez, president of the Mexican Board of the Construction Industry (Cámara Mexicana de la Industria de la Construcción, or CMIC) in Guadalajara. He noted that City Hall revised local building codes in 1997, aiming at better earthquake preparedness.
While Méndez was not profoundly optimistic about the answer to the question about enforcement, he insisted on its importance.
“This is the task of professionals. It depends on the ethics of the builders, contractors, workers, City Hall and whoever buys a house or other buildings. Being responsible is everyone’s job.”
Likewise, Guadalajara Mayor Enrique Alfaro, whose election reflected citizens’ hopes for a more responsible government, said earthquake preparedness and even knowing which buildings are at risk are no simple matters.
“Of course, what just happened [in other parts of Mexico] is a wake-up call for everyone to have a much deeper prevention agenda … and of course that all the licenses and authorizations given
to new buildings be in accord with technical standards that include measures to avoid risks as much as possible in case of earthquakes,” he said.
Though memories of destructive earthquakes in Jalisco appear dim in the general population, both Alfaro and Méndez expressed
awareness of them.
“In 1818, the towers of the cathedral fell down,” said Alfaro, noting that in May 2016, the famous Orozco mural was damaged in the University of Guadalajara’s Paraninfo dome, he said.
Méndez emphasized the very destructive series of local earthquake in June 1932, one of which killed an estimated 400 people in Jalisco. “It was magnitude 8.4,” he noted, even higher than the later (1985), 8.1 magnitude temblor in Mexico City, which killed around 10,000 people in collapsing buildings and was exacerbated by Mexico City’s unstable lakebed geology.
“The 1932 earthquake in Jalisco was the largest ever recorded in Mexico at the time,” he emphasized.
Méndez was not sanguine about the chances of another large earthquake affecting Jalisco. “Some people say they occur here every 80 or 100 years,” he said. “And the last strong one was 85 years ago.”
Canadian geologist and Guadalajara resident Chris Lloyd is not worried about the periodicity of earthquakes, noting that “earthquakes don’t pay attention to that.” Neither is he optimistic about the readiness of local authorities to assess and improve the sturdiness of buildings.
“Building inspectors or architects are qualified to examine buildings, but their supervisors are political appointees whose number one priority may not be protecting citizens,” said Lloyd.
And programs by governments to inspect and make buildings earthquake safe are expensive. In 2015, Los Angeles City Hall passed a law mandating retrofits of concrete buildings, reports the Los Angeles Times, noting there are about 1,500 such structures in Los Angeles and that Mexico uses a lot of concrete construction, too. The Los Angeles law mandates that after owners are ordered to retrofit a building, they have a generous 25 years to so do.
Méndez noted that up-to-date ultrasound or radar equipment that can help assess the safety of existing buildings and their foundations is lacking in Jalisco. Lloyd estimated that such units can be expensive. “This is nondestructive equipment used in archeology,” he explained.
“Japan is the gold standard for implementing building codes,” Lloyd added. Indeed, eerie videos of Tokyo skyscrapers swaying but not collapsing in the giant (9.1 magnitude) 2011 earthquake (the cause of the infamous tsunami) are testament to the efficacy of Japanese building standards.
“I supervised the construction of my two-story house in the outskirts of Guadalajara,” said Lloyd. “It’s built like a tank so I feel safe here, even though it got small cracks in the columns in an earthquake in 2003.” He added that qualified architects and inspectors can go a long way toward assessing if individual buildings are earthquake hardy.
Mexico may be making progress, based on a comparison between the 1985 and 2017 temblors. Even though the ’85 earthquake was of 8.1 magnitude (which represents far more extreme shaking than the 7.1 magnitude of the recent quake), many more people were killed in 1985 than in 2017 (some 10,000 deaths in 1985 vs. 342 deaths in 2017). It is guesswork whether the decrease in deaths in 2017 is due to sturdier buildings or simply to weaker shaking, but many Mexico City buildings have proven very sturdy in recent years, such as the Torre Latino-Americano. Méndez pointed out that this 80- to 90-year-old building has withstood three earthquakes.