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Seismologist tells regret, expectation of quake prediction

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-05-12 13:35

BEIJING - Sun Shihong was driving toward Kunming in southwest China's Yunnan Province when his handset beeped. It was about 2:34 p.m. on May 12, 2008.

The text message from a monitoring station in Qinghai Province said a 7.8-magnitude earthquake had just taken place in Sichuan, neighboring province of Yunnan. The epicenter, marked by longitude and latitude, was later identified as Wenchuan County.

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A senior earthquake expert with the Beijing-based China Earthquake Administration (CEA), Sun had come to Yunnan a couple days earlier on a field assignment. "I was surprised, but not entirely," Sun recalled in an interview with Xinhua.

Sun was one of the nine chief predictors at CEA's China Earthquake Networks Center (CENC). He specialized in quake prediction based on data analysis. In 2006 he forecasted that there would be a strong earthquake within two or three years somewhere in southwest China.

"I was surprised it occurred in Wenchuan," Sun said with regret. Hardly a month before, he had been in Sichuan on a different research trip not far from Wenchuan.

"We failed to include that part of Sichuan in the danger zone, because there were few significant tremors or abnormal signs associated with the Wenchuan area," Sun said, "Looking back now, a year later, I still say it was impossible for us to make the prediction. We've done our job."

Hurrying back to Beijing on the earliest available flight, Sun landed at the airport well past midnight. He took a few hours of sleepless rest at home before going to the office. He then spent days dealing with the media.

A teacher holding a Chinese national flag leads earthquake survivors and students to visit the site where landslides completely buried a village and more than 780 people at Donghekou Earthquake Site Park, a memorial park for Sichuan earthquake victims, in Qingchuan county, Sichuan province, May 11, 2009. China on Tuesday will mark one year since the May 12 earthquake that devastated parts of the country's southwest. [Agencies]

Unlike many of his colleagues, Sun did not fly to Wenchuan shortly after the quake. In addition to dealing with the media, he was on a special mission to ensure the safety of the Beijing Olympic Games. He did not have a single day off till the Games was over. He retired in October but has remained closely involved in earthquake affairs.

He participated in the revision of the Law on Protecting Against and Mitigating Earthquake Disasters. He was entrusted to take charge of the third chapter, which covers monitoring and prediction. The work of revising the legislation actually started in July 2007. The Wenchuan earthquake quickened its pace. The new law became effective on May 1.

Not everyone was happy with the new law, though. Opinions were divided over the use of "prediction," which means releasing or publicizing a quake forecast, Sun said. People who wanted to delete the word said that current earthquake science was incapable of making accurate forecasts.

The longstanding dispute over prediction was rekindled by the failure in Wenchuan. Proponents argued that prediction was needed because of the country's unique conditions. China was quake-prone and protective measures against it, especially construction, were far from adequate.

Predictions, therefore, were seen as the best option. It has been done, for example, in February 1975, when a 7.3 magnitude quake occurred in north China's Haicheng.

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