Last month's earthquake off Taiwan that killed two people and injured 42 has revived a debate on earthquake prediction as several residents of the island claimed they had predicted it because they heard strange sounds or had chest pains.
The most popular among these earthquake predictors is Li Chen-chi, 38, an insurance company manager who claims he can hear sounds before an earthquake occurs. Chen said that several days before the December 26 quake struck off Hengchun in southern Taiwan, he heard sounds like a ship's horn and radio jamming and he e-mailed his predictions to friends and Professor Chu Tzu-hau, a geologist at National Taiwan University.
The quake, measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale, destroyed 15 houses and damaged undersea cables, disrupting telecommunications across Asia. Lee said he realised he could predict earthquakes after a magnitude-7.3 quake on September 21, 1999, which left 2,415 dead, 11,305 injured and 400,000 homeless in Taichung and Nantou counties in central Taiwan.
"After that quake, I realised that whenever I heard muffled sounds, an earthquake would occur in the next few days, so I began to e-mail my predictions to the Seismological Observation Centre". After several correct predictions, Lee became a national celebrity with reporters following him every day, asking him if he had heard strange sounds and when a big quake might hit.
Three dozen other earthquake predictors soon emerged, claiming they could predict earthquakes because they, too, could hear strange sounds or picked up other signs.
The SOC, fed up with their predictions, banned unofficial earthquake prediction in 2005. Violators of the ban face a1-million-Taiwan-dollar (30,000-US-dollar) fine.
Hsiao Nai-chi, an SOC section chief, said most of the unprofessional predictions were unreliable and inconsistent, "so we must rely on scientific data from our equipments," he told dpa.
Taiwan lies on the circum-Pacific seismic belt, where 68 per cent of the world's earthquakes strike, and sits on 52 fault lines. About 200 quakes of at least magnitude 4 jolt Taiwan each year with a dozen of them above magnitude 5. Taiwan, whose population density ranks 14th in the world with 636 people per each square kilometre, live under constant fear of earthquakes.
Currently, SOC, relying on 70 monitoring stations, can report an earthquake five to 10 minutes after it has struck Taiwan or off Taiwan's coast. But many Taiwanese, like Chu, a geologist at National Taiwan University, said they believe that animals, human beings and scientific equipment can all predict earthquakes.
"A month and a half before the September 21, 1999, earthquake hit Taiwan, Chinese space scientists had predicted it, but they did not notify Taiwan until after the quake due to strained Beijing-Taipei ties," Chu said.
The Chinese scientists had noticed - through satellite thermal imaging - a two- to six-degree Centigrade rise in temperature on the ocean surface around Taiwan, the geologist said.
Chu added that among the three dozen earthquake predictors in Taiwan, five to six are accurate. They include Lee and Chiu Tai-yuan, 66, a dry-cleaning store owner in Panchiao near Taipei. Chiu claimed that he developed the ability to predict earthquakes while meditating in 1984.
"My body went through a transformation," he told dpa and, referring to the Chinese belief in an energy that flows through everything that exists, added, "All the channels of the chi opened, and my body became a cosmos. When one part aches, I can tell an earthquake will happen in the coming days, and I can tell you the location."
"My head is south, my feet are north, my right side is east and my left side is west, so if I have a pain near my head, it indicates a quake will hit southern Taiwan, and a pain toward my feet means a quake will hit Japan," he said.
On January 3, Chiu called the dpa office saying he had received signals indicating an earthquake was going to hit eastern Taiwan in about three days, "but it'll be a small one." A magnitude-4.3 quake hit eastern Taiwan two days later.
On January 4 and 5, Chiu said he was "receiving signals" again and knew a large quake was going to occur north of Taiwan, possibly in Japan. It would be an undersea quake because it was a dull pain, he said.
On Saturday, a magnitude-8.2 undersea earthquake occurred near Japan's northern islands, triggering two tidal waves but not the metre-high tsunami as Japan Meteorological Agency and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre had warned.
-DPA