Integrating Earthquake Early Warnings into Organisational Resilience: The case-study of Mexico City

Mexico has been historically impacted by earthquakes due to its geographical location within the well-known ring of fire. In September 1985, a large earthquake heavily affected the country, leaving behind a substantial death-toll, injuries and hundreds of collapsed structures. As a result, many DRR changes emerged, such as establishing the National System of Civil Protection and updating the construction code for Mexico City, adding new necessary regulations regarding seismic design. The Mexican Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) system was also proposed in 1986, and in 1991 the system began operations.

The EEW system was tested in September 2017 when two earthquakes hit the south and central regions of the country, on the 7^th and 19^th of September, respectively.  A 90-seconds warning was effectively released to the residents of Mexico City on September 7, but no alert was given on September 19, as the area surrounding the epicentre was not covered by the EEW’s seismic network.  In addition, the capital was very close to the epicentre, therefore, if the EEW was able to provide a warning, it would have been very short, and the impact had still been the same. This was challenging to accept. The residents expressed their concerns as they expected to receive an alert.

In the last two years, several scholars investigated peoples’ reactions to the Mexican EEW system. The results show that there is a lack of public understanding on how the Mexican EEW system operates. In that same period of time, also my interest in the topic raised significatively. I started talking with relatives and friends who live in Mexico City. I understood that few people nowadays are properly informed about the operational basics and potential benefits of the EEW system.

In April 2019, my supervisor Dr Carmine Galasso (UCL CEGE) and I decided to extend the topic of my thesis in earthquake engineering to include the societal dimension of the EEW. We involved Dr Gianluca Pescaroli (UCL IRDR) as second supervisor, who suggested to focus on understanding how organisations integrate the alerts in their operational procedures. This was developed into a phased project titled ‘Integrating earthquake early warnings into organisational resilience’. The different components of the project were financed by the British Academy’s Leverhulme Small Research Grant, supported by the United Kingdom’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Grant Reference: SRG19\191797), and by the Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team’s (EEFIT) 2019 Research Award. The main goal of this project is to provide new and impact-oriented insights on the connection between the technical and social components of the Mexican EEW. In particular, we aim to investigate which measures could be needed to increase the organisational resilience of local community stakeholders and the private sector, such as business and infrastructure providers, deriving new guidelines for improving emergency preparedness.

Our first steps led to a journal paper, currently in review, that studied the technical and social aspects of EEW in 4 countries where EEWs operate with different levels of maturity: Italy (Campania region), the USA (West-Coast), Mexico and Japan. What emerged in the Mexican context shows that technically the EEW system performs well but the applicability in the social and organisational context is very poor. We investigated the critical interaction between the technical, organisational, social and political spheres, including elements such as stakeholders’ perceptions of the Mexican EEW system, the current status of planning for mitigating disruptions, and training needs related to EEW.

The second phase of the project involved data collection in Mexico City. As a research assistant, I developed the fieldwork during the months of December and January. At this step, Professor Irasema Alcantara-Ayala (UNAM Mexico) and Ms Sandra Camacho-Otero (ARISE-MX) also became part of the investigation team. They were very kind in providing comments and suggestions for the format of the interview so that it became more contextualised to the Mexican background. I carried out 15 semi-structured interviews targeted at experts in the areas of Local Government-Civil Protection, Private Sector, Academia, Disaster Risk Reduction, Civil, Seismic and Mechanical Engineering, Hazard Modelling, Architecture, NGOs and Civil Societies. I sincerely thank my friends Oscar Cardel and Tai Cardel as they incredibly helped me to approach those top experts in Mexico City who are closely related to the EEW system.

After the third interview, I noted that the respondents were very interested in the subject, more than I actually imagined. During the 4^th interview, I decided to inquire more in the sections related to DRR education in Mexico, acceptability of false alerts and the perception of the EEW system outside Mexico City. This was done with the previous confirmation and consent of my supervisors as these topics were more secondary. In my opinion, this was a clever move as the respondents showed plenty of interest for every single question I was asking, and the collected data will result in very interesting conclusions and outcomes. In fact, the first interviews had a duration of 30 to 40 minutes approximately, while interviews 4 to 15 had a duration no shorter than 1.5 hours.

One of the biggest challenges I faced during the interviews was dealing with some concern as I knew I was interviewing very important people in Mexico. Also, some questions exposed subjects about the lack of organisation and capacity of the EEW system and of those bodies in charge of DRR in Mexico City. At some point, I thought their hierarchy and expertise might come over me and make me hesitate or feel without confidence during the interviews. However, I managed to have a composed attitude during every single interview and whenever the atmosphere became slightly challenging, I knew how to deal with the situation. Nevertheless, I did not have any kind of tough discussion nor important issues with any of the interviewees. I strongly believe the fact that all questions had a strong background based on previous studies and experiences, and that I prepared myself, mentally and academically, helped me a lot not to panic.

A second visit to Mexico City was planned in the months of March and April to distribute a questionnaire and obtain more data. However, the Covid-19 pandemic did not allow it. Therefore, we had to switch to an online format and produce an online questionnaire that was delivered through the UCL’s Web-Based Survey Tool ‘Opinio’. I would also like to express my gratitude to my friend Mara Torres-Pinedo for her recommendations and ideas to improve the quality of the questionnaire.

Right now, the project is at the analysis stage where we are implementing qualitative and quantitative analyses of the collected data. In the following weeks, we are expecting to culminate the analysis process and begin the discussion phase. Considering the data acquired, we feel confident that the results of the study will have a positive significance, so we are targeting to publish our results in a high-impact journal for the dissemination of the results and conclusions.

For more information and updates, please visit the ResearchGate website of the project.