Will Bangkok fall out of love with skyscrapers after earthquake rocks city?

Bangkok, Thailand – Methinee Phoovatis scoured a small computer screen in the teeming metropolis of central Bangkok in search of survivors.

Surrounding Methinee, other members of Thailand’s Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation (DDPM) coordinated the dozens of rescue workers shuttling along a path that led to an enormous mound of debris.

The rescue teams scoured the area for any signs of life beneath the imposing hill of cement and steel.

We’re just hoping that some of the people are still alive, Methinee, a DDPM plan and policy analyst, told Al Jazeera.

It was four days after a magnitude 7.7 earthquake jolted Bangkok on March 28, and as the hours and days passed, the chances of Methinee and her colleagues finding survivors were increasingly slim.

We are making every effort to help the people. They are still alive, she said, standing next to a whiteboard that displays the list of 73 people still missing under the rubble of the 30-story, unfinished building that was meant to house Thailand’s National Audit Office.

The earthquake that rocked the Thai capital was particularly shallow, just 10km (6.2 miles) deep, which intensified the shock waves on the earth’s surface.

Bangkok was brought to a standstill by the earthquake, which was located more than 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) from the epicentre of Myanmar, where thousands of people died. As buildings swayed and shuddered, panicked residents of this city of more than 11 million people rushed out into the streets in search of safety.

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

However, some in Bangkok are concerned about the safety of high-rise living in the world’s 12th tallest city because of the dozens of fatalities, the majority of which occurred at the site of the collapsed audit office building.

‘ People were screaming ‘

Harry Yang was suddenly put off by a sudden nausea-inducing sway of the lamps in his 41-story, nine-story apartment.

The 29-year-old has called Bangkok his home since he was a child and ran out onto my balcony and “everything was shaking.”

“People were screaming”, he said.

Yang immediately recalls his aging father, who has mobility issues and lives on the 32nd floor of a different high-rise building in Bangkok.

Although his father, an antique dealer, was unharmed, the earthquake razed many of his antiques and terrified him.

“My dad is 68 years old, he has leg problems, and he needed to climb down” stairs to reach the ground floor, Yang said.

People were scared for a good reason. Bangkok trembled, with debris falling to the ground and water rushing in torrents from skyscraper infinity swimming pools, according to social media video clips.

Lapaphutch Lertsachanant was in her condominium on the 27th floor when the quake struck.

“The building was figuratively squat side to side,” the statement read. At that point, I really thought the building might be split in half, Lapaphutch said.

“I really thought that I wouldn’t survive”, she added, recalling her desire to speak to her partner one final time by phone. I believed I might speak with him in his final moments. In my final moments of life, he would be there for me.

Although seismic events in the wider Southeast Asia region are common, the scale of the quake that hit Myanmar – where more than 3, 700 people were killed – and shook Bangkok took many by surprise.

Myanmar is directly on a tectonic fault line, the Sagaing Fault, according to Wang Yu, associate professor in the National Taiwan University’s geoscience department. The March 28 earthquake resulted from a strike-slip fault between the India and Eurasian plates.

A strike-slip refers to a tectonic fault in which two plates move horizontally past one another, according to the USGS. Since 1900, the USGS reports that six other large earthquakes with a magnitude of 7.0 or more have occurred within 250km (155 miles) of the epicentre in Myanmar of the March 28 quake.

According to Wang Yu, the impact of these earthquakes can be increased because Bangkok is built on an unstable basin of soil.

The seismic wave’s amplitude will increase as it travels from the outside into the basin, he said.

But the precise reason why the building in central Bangkok collapsed remains under investigation. No other structure in Bangkok experienced such a catastrophic failure, despite the destruction of numerous structural structures. Officials in Thailand have begun an investigation to check whether proper building regulations were followed.

Earthquake resistant design:

In 1997, Thailand first enacted building seismic regulations. In 2007, new legislation specified that buildings higher than 15 metres (49ft) in high-risk areas like Bangkok must be built to withstand quakes of up to magnitude 7.0. The Thai Department of Public Works and Town and Country Planning developed a comprehensive “Standard for Earthquake Resistant Design of Buildings” in 2009, two years after.

In light of these building and engineering regulations, how might Bangkok’s almost-built structure collapse?

“I think we need to find the root cause so at least we can learn some lessons and improve building regulations”, Bangkok Governor Chadchart Sittipunt said shortly after the quake, as local authorities fanned out across Thailand to test buildings and assess whether they were still structurally sound.

The majority of the time, according to the safety standards, have been met.

The Metropolitan Authority of Bangkok, aside from the building collapse site, announced the end of the “disaster situation” in Bangkok on April 3, just six days after the earthquake.

Some residents are still concerned after the disaster because of lingering feelings of insecurity caused by superficial cracks and other damage to their high-rise homes.

Varuth Pongsapipatt, 32, was dealing with the series of cracks running up the walls of his apartment despite engineers’ assurances that it was safe to live there.

“It’s quite scary, but it has no effect on the structure of the building, so it’s OK”, he told Al Jazeera.

After the earthquake, Lapaphutch claimed that she was forced to move into her parents’ home for almost three weeks and was not ready to move back to her 27th-floor apartment because the elevator in her condominium was out of commission.

She said, “I don’t feel safe moving back to living in a tall building.”

Harry Yang said his father had refused to return to his 32-floor home, worried that aftershocks may occur.

“My parents are very worried,” my parents said. Since the earthquake struck, my father has been staying at a hotel, Yang reported to Al Jazeera earlier this month.

Slow response

According to research conducted by Thailand’s National Institute of Development Administration (NIDA), about 68 percent of respondents were concerned about building stability and safety.

Some people were concerned about the impact on the real estate market as well.

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

“I believe that this will have a significant impact on consumer confidence and the housing market.” Many people are trying to relocate, he said.

Following the quake, Thai financial analysts predicted that condominium sales could be hit with potential buyers thinking twice before purchasing a high-rise building in Bangkok, placing further pressure on the country’s property sector.

Low-rise homes, which are thought to be less susceptible to seismic events, are anticipated to experience windfall as a result of the March 28 earthquake. This pattern will be similar to what was said earlier this month in the Bangkok Post newspaper about the trend that homebuyers were led to prefer condos over low-rise homes in 2011.

The quake also exposed serious shortcomings in Thailand’s emergency alert system.

Although an earthquake warning system was intended to provide information to the Thai public, batches of 200, 000 could only be distributed at once, causing a bottleneck that slowed down communication in the nation of almost 72 million.

Harry Yang claimed neither his parents nor he received any text messages for an immediate response. They were forced to search online for information after the quake hit.

Lapaphutch, a resident of Bangkok, added that she had never received any emergency information after the earthquake.

She said, “We really need this kind of system that can alert us.” “Everyone in Thailand should be reviewing these kinds of notifications to make us well prepared”.

Nearly 60% of those polled were concerned about the effectiveness of early warning systems, according to the survey conducted by NIDA. According to local reports, Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra has since called for system upgrades to increase the alert batches’ broadcast capacity to one million at once.

Despite the challenges, Thailand emerged from the tremor relatively unscathed.

Bangkok’s Chatuchak Weekend Market, which was just meters away from the collapsed 30-storey structure, was already attracting tourists just days after the earthquake, making the events seem almost distant memories in a city that never sleeps.

Harry Yang agreed.

Bangkok residents had initially felt scared, but that would pass, he said.

Source: Aljazeera