Will Bangkok fall in love with skyscrapers after the earthquake is locked? | Earthquake News

Bangkok, Thailand – In a metropolis in central Bangkok, Mething’s face balls were hoping to monitor a small computer screen and find signs of survivors.

Other members of the Thai Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Bureau (DDPM), the surrounding mechnese, have closed dozens of rescuers along the road leading to the mound of the giant tile debris.

The rescuers worked on the shifts, looming above them, searching for signs of life beneath the hills of cement and steel.

“We want the miracle that some people are still alive,” Metine, a planning and policy analyst at DDPM, told Al Jazeera.

Four days after the magnitude 7.7 earthquake rocked Bangkok on March 28th, the chances that Mechinee and her colleagues might find survivors have become increasingly slimmer.

“We’re doing our best for people. Hopefully, they’re still alive,” she said. She was standing next to a whiteboard showing the tally of 73 people still missing under the tiled ble of an unfinished 30-storey building designed to house Thailand’s national audit office.

The earthquake that shook the Thai capital was particularly shallow, at just 10 km (6.2 miles) deep, strengthening the shock waves on the surface of the Earth.

It was located more than 1,200 km (750 miles) from the Myanmar epicenter, where thousands of people were killed, but the earthquake caused Bangkok to halt. More than 11 million panicked residents of the city rushed onto the streets for safety, as buildings shook and trembled.

A month later, life in the Thai capital returned to normal.

But dozens of deaths – most of them in the site of collapsed audit office buildings – and the shock of the events of March 28th spurred concerns about the safety of high-rise living in the world’s 12th-highest city for some Bangkok.

“People were screaming.”

The sudden sensation of nausea and the shaking of the lamps inside his apartment on the ninth floor of the 41-storey building informed Harry Yang that he was in danger.

“I ran to the balcony and everything was shaking,” the 29-year-old calls Bangkok his home since birth.

“People were screaming,” he said.

Yang ran down the fire escape stairs and soon thought of the father of an elderly man who lives on the 32nd floor of another high-rise building in Bangkok and suffered from mobility issues.

His father, who works as an antique dealer, kicks it out of an unharmed trial, but the earthquake destroys many of his bones and terrifies him.

“My dad was 68 years old and had leg issues and he had to climb,” Yang said.

People had good reason to be scared. In the social media video clip, Bangkok shook, debris fell to the ground, and water poured into rapids from an infinity swimming pool over the water.

Lapaphutch Lertsachanant was in an apartment on the 27th floor when the earthquake struck.

“The building was literally moving left and right, and at that moment I really felt that I could cut the building in half,” Rapahucci said.

“I really thought I wouldn’t survive,” she added, recalling her desire to talk to her partner over the phone at the end. “I thought I had a last word with him. He would be with me in my last moments.”

Seismic events in the wider Southeast Asia region are common, but the scale of the earthquake that struck Myanmar, which killed more than 3,700 people, has surprised many who shook Bangkok.

Wang Yu, an associate professor at the Department of Earth Sciences at National Taiwan University, said Myanmar had the earthquake on March 28 after a sliding fault between plates in India and Eurasia.

According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), a strike slip refers to a structural fault in which two plates move horizontally with each other. Since 1900, the USGS has reported that six other major earthquakes, over 7.0, have occurred within 250km (155 miles) of Quake’s Myanmar epicenter on March 28th.

Bangkok is built on a basin of unstable soil that can enhance the effectiveness of these earthquakes, Wang Yu explained.

“When seismic waves travel from outside to the basin, the amplitude of the seismic wave increases,” he said.

However, the exact reason why the building in central Bangkok collapsed remains under investigation. Other buildings in Bangkok did not suffer from such devastating failure, but many maintained structural damage. Thai officials have launched an investigation to assess whether appropriate building protocols have been followed.

“Seismic Resistance Design”

Thailand first introduced earthquake regulations on buildings in 1997. In 2007, a new law specified that buildings over 15 meters (49 feet) must be able to withstand earthquakes up to 7.0 magnitude in high-risk areas such as Bangkok. Two years later, in 2009, Thailand’s Public Works Bureau and town and national plans introduced a comprehensive “criterion for earthquake resistance design for buildings.”

Given these buildings and engineering regulations, questions have been raised about how nearly constructed buildings in Bangkok collapse.

“I think we need to find the underlying cause so that we can at least learn some lessons and improve the regulations on the building,” Bangkok Governor Chadchart Sittypant said shortly after the earthquake to help local governments ramble around Thailand, test the buildings and assess whether they are still structurally healthy.

So far, the majority have been considered to meet safety standards.

On April 3, just six days after the earthquake, Bangkok’s metropolitan authorities declared the end of Bangkok’s “disaster situation” except at the site of the building collapse.

Now, a month after the disaster, some residents are still concerned as superficial rifts and other damage to high-rise housing contribute to prolonged feelings of anxiety.

Despite declaring his apartment as safe, 32-year-old Varuth Pongsapipatt discovers that the series of cracks running along the walls of his apartment are a bit unsettling, but he was dealing with it.

“It’s very scary, but it’s fine as it doesn’t affect the structure of the building,” he told Al Jazeera.

When the condo elevator put out a committee after the earthquake, Rapahucci said she was forced to move to her parents’ house for almost three weeks, and she was not in a hurry to return to the location on the 27th floor.

“I don’t think it’s safe to go back to living in a tall building,” she said.

Harry Yang said his father refused to return to his 32nd floor home, and worried that aftershocks would occur.

“My parents are really worried. My dad has been staying at the hotel since the earthquake occurred,” Yang told Al Jazeera earlier this month.

The response is slow

A study by the National Development Institute of Thailand (NIDA) after the earthquake found that approximately 68% of respondents were concerned about the stability and safety of the building.

For some, the impact on the real estate market was also a concern.

“I’m more concerned about property prices,” Yang said.

“I think this will have a big impact on the real estate market and the trust of the consumer. A lot of people are trying to find a way to move,” he said.

Following Quake, Thai financial analysts predicted that before buying a skyscraper in Bangkok, potential buyers will be hit twice with the sale of apartments and putting more pressure on the country’s real estate sector.

“The March 28 earthquake is expected to create windfalls on low-rise homes, which is perceived as not vulnerable to seismic events. This trend reflects the changes seen in 2011 when nationwide flooding began to increase home buyers favor condominiums over low-rise homes.”

The trembling also brought serious drawbacks in Thailand’s emergency warning system.

The earthquake warning system was supposed to keep updating Thai public with information, but warning messages could only be sent in batches of 200,000 at a time, creating a bottleneck that would slow communications in the country of around 72 million people.

Harry Yang said neither he nor his parents had received emergency response messages. They were forced to search online for information after a tremble struck.

For weeks after Quake, Bangkok resident Rapahucci said he had never received emergency information.

“We really need this kind of system that can warn us,” she said. “Everyone in Thailand needs to review these types of notifications to prepare us well.”

A NIDA survey showed that almost 60% of those who received the poll were concerned about the effectiveness of the early warning system. According to local reports, Thai Prime Minister Paetong Tarun Sinawatra has since asked for a system upgrade to increase the broadcasting capacity of alert batches to 1 million at a time.

Despite the challenges, Thailand emerged relatively unharmed from a trembling.

Just a few metres from the grounds of the collapsed 30-storey building, Bangkok’s Chatuchak Weekend Market was already bustling with tourists a few days after the earthquake. And the event looked like a distant memory of a city that never actually slept.

Harry Yang agreed.

Bangkok residents were initially scared, but they’ll pass by, he said.

“In the end, we’ll be back to normal.”