Office of Disaster Preparedness and Management (ODPM) CEO Dr Stephen Ramroop said yesterday he would not have expected a hospital to be constructed near an earthquake fault line if there was collaboration with scientists in the planning stage of such a project.
He said so as he admitted yesterday that neither the ODPM nor the University of the West Indies (UWI) Seismic Research Centre had been invited to conduct risk assessments for the Couva children’s hospital’s present location, which is being objected to by seismic and structural experts.
Seismic experts, civil and structural engineers have now been invited to a meeting on Friday with Health Minister Dr Fuad Khan, Housing Minister Dr Roodal Moonilal and the Urban Development Company of Trinidad and Tobago (Udecott) officials to discuss their concerns after the T&T Guardian highlighted objections to the hospital being constructed close to the Central Range earthquake fault line at Preysal, Couva.
Yesterday, Ramroop, speaking with the T&T Guardian, said: “I do not expect that a hospital should be built on a fault line, especially if the authorities and the scientists have all collaborated and decided that it should not be built.” Last week, seismologist Dr Joan Latchman, of the UWI Seismic Research Centre, expressed her concern over the close proximity of the hospital to the earthquake fault line. She suggested the hospital be relocated. Geologist Dr Krishna Persad also agreed with her concerns.
At present, seismic experts believe the fault line is locked which means it is building strain energy that can cause a major earthquake if it ruptures. Ramroop said yesterday he could not comment on the choice of location since he was not part of the process of Udecott’s geo-technical survey or risk assessment survey. He lamented that at the ODPM “we do not have any legislative mandate to demand those plans for looking at the risks, although that is our responsibility as of the Cabinet minutes of 2010.”
Ramroop said the ODPM was a division of the National Security Ministry that could be considered as the overall risk management unit when it came to disaster risk reduction but did not have the legislative mandate to dictate “that we see the plans which would or should have been submitted to the local government municipality.” Persad, in a letter to the T&T Guardian, provided scientific proof the fault line was at risk for a major earthquake.
Quoting from a paper, entitled “Triangulation-to-GPS and GPS-to-GPS Geodesy in Trinidad, West Indies: Neotectonics, Seismic Risk, and Geologic Implications,” written by Dr J C Weber and others, he said an earthquake of magnitude 7.0 occurring along the Central Range Fault could be stronger and destructive than the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Yesterday, Ramroop said he hoped Udecott, as stated in a press release earlier this week, had followed due process in the planning and design of the hospital.
He explained that “the authorities will be able to pick up this sort of (seismic) evidence which affects the risks of the building and future risks.” He said if that was the case and if they had any concerns, “they would have sent it to the scientists, such as the UWI Seismic Department, for comment or they would have entertained their comment.”
Ramroop added: “We just hope that everything has been done according to the scientists. I am also saying that there are buildings that are constructed where there are earthquake risks, very close to fault lines, such as malls, and they have been constructed with technologies that take into consideration the movement of these faults.”