Geoscience Australia shares tips to stay safe if Adelaide gets hit by an earthquake

Experts predict Adelaide will experience a huge earthquake in the future – these are the public places you don’t want to be.

Adelaide’s traditional shopping strips such as Rundle Mall, Hindley Street, Prospect Road and The Parade would be the most dangerous places to be in an earthquake, experts say.

Falling bricks and masonry would likely kill pedestrians or people driving by, as in the Christchurch earthquake of 2011.

Living downstream of a large reservoir such as Myponga or Mount Bold would also be risky, in the event of dam wall failure.

The safest place would be the Royal Adelaide Hospital, which was built to withstand strong earthquakes in order to receive and treat the injured.

Adelaide is one of Australia’s most seismically active areas, straddling several faults.

Last week Geoscience Australia announced Adelaide could experience an earthquake 30 times more powerful than the one that hit Christchurch, after field research on the Willunga fault line revealed evidence of large earthquakes in our distant past.

Earthquake geologist Dr Dan Clark told the Sunday Mail that about a dozen faults were “potentially as active as the Willunga fault within 40 or 50 kilometres of the Adelaide CBD”, posing a risk to public safety.

“Definitely the most vulnerable bits in Adelaide will be brick buildings, unreinforced masonry,” he said.

“The parapets will fall off the shops in main streets, (these parapets) tend to be just a couple of lines of bricks on the top of the building. Steeples and gargoyles and things can fall off churches.”

The City of Churches is also known for pedestrian shopping strips lined with heritage buildings that were not built to withstand strong “ground shaking”.

Debris crushes a car outside the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament after a 6.3 magnitude earthquake rocked Christchurch in 2011.

“If (bricks, steeples and gargoyles) fall from a height they have the potential to do a lot of damage to people and things in the street, which is why we try and reinforce to people that running out in the street during an earthquake is not a good idea,” Dr Clark said.

“Things are likely to be falling off the front of buildings and you don’t want to be there when bricks come down,” he said.

The best course of action during an earthquake is to “drop, cover and hold”. That means drop to the ground; cover your head and neck; ideally get under something solid, such as a table; and hold on tight.

University of Adelaide structural engineering emeritus professor Michael Griffith, who has led research simulating earthquakes to test how heritage buildings will cope, said “brickwork almost always falls outward” onto the footpath or roadway.

He said that of the 42 people that died when unreinforced masonry buildings shook in Christchurch, 2011, “39 were outside the building, on the footpath or in vehicles parked on the road”.

The parapet, which is the brickwork that goes above the ceiling line and runs along the streetfronts, may look nice but “may not be well attached”.