The National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering (NCREE) said it would next year launch an updated version of its Townhouse Earthquake-Resistance Portal to include information on apartment buildings.
The portal provides information on the seismic risk of townhouses five stories and under. Since about 70 percent of Taiwan’s population lives in some form of multi-unit apartment building, and more than 6 million residential units nationwide are more than 30 years old, an updated portal to include information on those buildings was urgently needed, the NCREE said.
“The center has been studying nationwide seismic force data, such as basin effects, seismic-wave amplification and soil conditions,” NCREE Director Yu Chen (昱辰) said. “At the same time, we are developing seismic-resilience technologies and drafting structural safety standards.”
Photo courtesy of the Kaohsiung Public Works Bureau
The NCREE was instrumental in efforts to reinforce thousands of school structures following the 921 Earthquake, when a magnitude 7.3 earthquake hit Taiwan in the early morning hours of Sept. 21, 1999.
However, the collapse of the Weiguan Jinlong housing complex due to a magnitude 6.6 quake on Feb. 6, 2016, highlighted the pressing need to evaluate the seismic capacity of the nation’s aging private residences, Yu said.
The building’s collapse resulted in the deaths of 115 people.
Partially in response to the Weiguan incident, the NCREE in 2020 established a project office tasked with reinforcing weak buildings and prioritizing high-risk multi-unit apartment complexes, he said, adding that the office has reinforced 171 buildings to date.
It also established the portal so that people living in private townhouses could check the seismic vulnerability of their building and use that information to decide whether building reinforcements are necessary, Yu said.
The apartment building version of the portal would allow residents to look up their building’s structural risk, he said.
“However, we acknowledge that old-building ownership structures are often complicated, and seismic retrofits require additional spending by all residents,” Yu said, adding that a building assessment alone could cost between tens of thousands and several hundred thousand New Taiwan dollars, and reinforcement work could cost residents up to NT$200,000 per unit.
“The high costs, combined with the fact that design work takes several months and construction can require up to half a year means many homeowners are unwilling to proceed,” he said.
Separately, NCREE Deputy Director Chai Chun-fu (柴駿甫) said AI and smart city technologies that integrate drone imagery, satellite data, 6G, virtual reality, big data, image recognition and cloud computing are making cities safer and improving the efficiency of urban services.
He cited as an example the 5D SmartES Smart City Platform in Kaohsiung, which could support flood control, disaster prevention, landslide monitoring, traffic-flow optimization, construction-site management, and smart healthcare and tourism.
“For instance, during a recent heavy-rain event, the system successfully predicted a slope failure in Kaohsiung, demonstrating its ability to forecast disasters,” he said. “This allows decisionmakers — even those far away — to issue disaster-response instructions immediately.”
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