Last Monday, August 26, at around 5:11 a.m. the Lisbon Metropolitan Area and other cities in Portugal woke up to a 5.3 earthquake on the Richter scale, which was felt from north to south and beyond. In this context, Lisbon City Council has now announced the launch of a new application for assessing seismic risk.
According to a press release from agency Lusa, quoted by Expresso, the innovative application, called LXReSist, is due to be launched this week. In practice, the aim is to detect the eventual seismic weaknesses of a given building. To do this, criteria such as the age of construction will be taken into account.
According to geologist Cláudia Pinto, quoted by the aforementioned media, LxReSist will also make it possible to identify some mitigation actions to prevent seismic risk. This new tool is aimed at ordinary citizens, so that they can obtain, for example, useful information about the houses they live in.
In addition, it is pertinent to point out that this application was already being developed and was practically ready, however Monday’s earthquake, the strongest in 55 years, will have accelerated its public presentation.
How to act in case of seismic risk?
According to the same expert, speaking to Lusa and quoted by Expresso, two simple measures can be taken to prevent seismic risk:
- Have an emergency kit on hand
- Checking the security of furniture
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