This article talks about building a hazard resistant building in the Philippines. Also there is an interesting Hazard Map of the Philippines. Palawan looks good..... On the building side I notice they refer to ductility....the ability to flex without breaking. Our Philippine house building project. Building to survive a Philippine earthquake. Philippine seismic design. "When we hired the engineer to design our house we were aware that the Philippines was included in the “ring of fire” earthquake zone and that our part of Panay Island had experienced a magnitude 8.2 earthquake in 1948. In 1948 the island was much less developed. Doubtless all or almost all the hollow block buildings on the island were built after 1948. The 1948 quake damaged or destroyed dozens of buildings. The huge and beautiful church in Oton was destroyed. The Alimodian church was heavily damaged. Bell towers were toppled, including that of the Jaro Cathedral. Of course these buildings were of very heavy unreinforced masonry construction. Many pre-War reinforced concrete buildings seemed to have survived quite well. None of these were built with hollow blocks. Engineers were well aware of Philippine earthquake dangers and built very strong public buildings. The strength of these massive Commonwealth-era government buildings were one reason that the Japanese forces were so hard to dislodge during the Battle for Manila." "We asked the engineers to design the house with earthquake survival in mind. They did so. The size and quantity of reinforcing bar was more typical of that used in a two story house. The columns were substantial. We took additional steps which we thought might help. We used 6″ rather than 4″ hollow block for the exterior walls. As the blocks were filled, the larger block had a much more significant concrete core . We tried to police the project to be sure proper rebar was used, in some cases tearing down and rebuilding when problems were found. We used a very strong 1-2-3 (concrete, sand, gravel) mix. We installed reinforced concrete lintel and tie beams. We thought we were doing what was necessary to build an earthquake resistant house. Recently we’ve been reading up on earthquake resistant building design. We learned that the really damaging earthquake motion is lateral shaking, not just vertical shaking, that lateral forces are the major destroyer of buildings. Structures built with concrete columns have great compressive strength but may not withstand lateral forces very well. Another concept we encountered was that buildings should have “ductility” — that is that they should be able to flex without breaking. We deduced that a concrete column and hollow block building is about as un-ductile a building as you can get. A wood or bamboo building is likely much better at accommodating lateral forces without damage." http://myphilippinelife.com/earthquake-philippines-design-right/
