Beyond the Sensor: Building a Quake-Proof Iloilo

When a disaster expert tells a vulnerable area it doesn’t need more monitoring equipment, it sounds counter-intuitive, even negligent. Yet, this is precisely the hard truth DOST Secretary Renato Solidum Jr. delivered to Iloilo. His message was clear: our obsession with high-tech detection is distracting us from the low-tech, high-effort work of resilience.

Solidum, a geologist who understands the ground beneath our feet, argues that knowing the exact magnitude of a quake milliseconds earlier changes very little. We already have enough sensors for that. What matters is what happens in the seconds after the shaking starts. As he aptly put it, “To assure the safety of people means to assure the safety of the building.”

This statement cuts to the core of the “Resilience Gap” – the dangerous chasm between detecting a hazard and surviving it.

We have seen this gap play out with devastating consequences globally. The 2023 earthquake in Turkey was not a failure of seismology; scientists had warned for decades about the East Anatolian Fault. It was a catastrophic failure of resilience. Buildings constructed with substandard materials and in defiance of codes pancaked, entombing thousands. The knowledge existed; the structural integrity did not.

Solidum is warning Iloilo to avoid this same fate. His proposed solutions are not futuristic gadgets but a return to foundational principles. He calls for rigorous building inspections, ensuring structural soundness, and a stark choice: retrofit or vacate unsafe structures.

For Iloilo, this advice is not generic. It is specific and urgent. Iloilo City is built on an alluvial plain, soft soil deposits highly susceptible to liquefaction.

During a strong quake, this ground can behave like a liquid, swallowing the foundations of structures not engineered to withstand it. This is why Solidum’s focus on “deep foundations and sound engineering” is the single most important conversation Iloilo can have. A new sensor cannot stop liquefaction; proper building codes, rigorously enforced, can.

The feasibility of this action plan, however, rests not with the DOST, but with our local government units and private sector. Enforcing the National Structural Code of the Philippines (NSCP) is an unglamorous, politically difficult job. It requires telling property owners they must spend significant money on retrofitting. It means inspectors must be uncompromising, and LGUs must have the political will to condemn unsafe buildings, particularly older ones that pose the greatest risk.

The question we must ask is: Are our current inspection processes merely a rubber stamp for compliance, or are they a genuine audit of structural safety?

Furthermore, Solidum’s call for the public to learn the PHIVOLCS Earthquake Intensity Scale (PEIS) is not a dismissal of technology, but a brilliant stroke of public empowerment. When residents can accurately report “My glass is shaking” (Intensity IV) versus “We are having difficulty standing” (Intensity VII), they become a massive, real-time network of human sensors. This data is arguably more valuable for first responders than a single magnitude reading, as it maps the impact of the quake, which, as Solidum notes, can vary dramatically from town to town.

Ultimately, Secretary Solidum is right. A new seismograph is a “feel-good” measure; a retrofitted school is a “do-good” measure. Detecting the next “Big One” is a scientific certainty. Surviving it is a political and engineering choice. That choice is made not in a laboratory, but in our city planning offices, on our construction sites, and in our willingness to invest in strong foundations over flashy sensors.