Six monitoring stations will be built to forecast and measure earthquakes in Ho Chi Minh City and southern provinces.
Between September and December last year, Nguyen Dinh Xuyen, former head of the Institute of Earth Physics under Hanoi-based Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, studied where earthquake monitoring stations were needed in the country’s south.
Xuyen’s report was delivered to authorities in April and the HCMC Department of Natural Resources and Environment now plans to build six stations in the provinces of Dong Nai, An Giang, Binh Phuoc and Ca Mau, Vung Tau city and HCMC.
The department will be in charge of receiving and processing data from the stations. HCMC is vulnerable to quakes that measure 5.0 and above on the Richter scale, although it is not located in a high risk quake area. Over the past few years HCMC has been hit by a couple of tremors.
The most recent one occurred last November. Twenty-two out of the country’s existing 24 earthquake monitoring stations are in the north, making the forecast of ground motions slow and ineffective in the country’s south, the scientists said.