President Ma Ying-jeou is calling for a renewed focus on building safety, in the hopes that Taiwan can learn from the latest quake and prevent similar incidents from happening again.
Ma was speaking on Thursday during his fourth visit to the disaster response center following Saturday’s quake, which has so far claimed 61 lives.
President Ma spoke about the experience of Japan, which saw a massive death toll following the Hanshin earthquake in 1995. He said that Japan had learned many lessons from that quake and had worked to improve building safety and earthquake preparedness. The president said that during the most recent Japanese quake, in 2011, most of the deaths were a result of a tsunami, while deaths from other causes were kept to a minimum.
Ma said that architects who inspected Tainan’s toppled Weiguan Jinlong complex discovered many of the same problems that were found in Taipei’s Tung-hsin building, which collapsed during a massive quake in 1999.
Ma said that Taipei had learned from the lessons of that collapse. He said that teams inspected every major building in the city, as well as the Xinyi Expressway, which was under construction at the time. Ma said the extra work was worth it, and that no building had collapsed when a subsequent earthquake rocked Taipei three years later.