Makati businessmen create culture of preparedness

Office workers, residents and shoppers in Makati and Bonifacio Global City (BGC)—home to the country’s leading central business districts—ducked, sought cover and fled to designated evacuation sites as part of a metropolis-wide earthquake drill on Thursday morning.

Based on data from Ayala Land Inc. (ALI), the biggest landlord at Makati and BGC central business districts (CBPs), about 13,882 people participated in this drill from Ayala-managed office skyscrapers and commercial centers in Makati; another 17,782 participated in BGC.

In Ayala Tower One, people ran down the stairs from as high as the 33rd floor to assemble at Ayala Triangle, the tree-laden open area behind the building. They were met with applause as they reached the ground floor.

Building administrators in Makati CBD set up command centers and designated evacuation sites to simulate what should be done when a big earthquake comes.

For other buildings along Ayala Avenue, the designated evacuation site was the southern half of the main artillery and was filled with a sea of people from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. on Thursday. The mood was mostly festive, with many groups taking “selfies” and “wefies” to document their participation in the drill.

Some people working on higher floors, however, chose to evacuate ahead of the 10:30 am simulation to avoid exhaustion or the huge crowd at the fire exits.

Breaking down the number of participants per area in Makati, Ayala Center—home to shopping centers like Glorietta and Greenbelt—had 4,183 “evacuees” while Makati CBD itself had 6,340. There were 2,924 people evacuated from the Makati Circuit area while some 435 participated in Paseo de Magallanes Center.

Manny Blas, vice president at ALI in charge of operations at both Makati and BGC, said he was impressed with the planning behind the drill.

“People treated it very seriously. They prepared for it, developed all sorts of scenarios and simulated incidents like fire, somebody being shot and LPG explosion. For these scenarios, the response was very good,” Blas said in an interview.

Having monitored the earthquake drill in both Makati and CBD, Blas said he was happy with the level of participation, heightened awareness and consciousness. At Ayala Center, for instance, he said all 37 locators participated.

In BGC, even construction workers in ongoing developments participated in the drill, he said.

Blas added that one good thing from this exercise was that he had seen face-to-face key representatives from local governments and agencies whom ALI would have to coordinate with in case such an earthquake occurs. He said it’s different when people like himself had interacted face-to-face with people from the Bureau of Fire, for instance.

“A drill is disruptive but I think it requires disruption to raise that level of awareness and create a culture of preparedness,” he said.

“I think we should have this more often. This builds muscle memory but it can be forgotten after a few months,” he added. Blas said he would advocate doing such a drill twice a year.

Blas said he concurred with Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology Director Renato Solidum who had said that there’s no such thing as a natural disaster and that something becomes a disaster depending on how prepared you are.

“You can’t really overprepare for this thing,” he said.

Within ALI-managed properties, Blas said the group had already been doing a similar drill at least once a year, sometimes in the morning sometimes in the evening to likewise include business process outsourcing (BPO) workers. With reports from Daxim L. Lucas and Riza T. Olchondra