Schools identified as key in earthquake preparedness

Earthquake-resistant building trainer Balkrishna Kasula is worried that thousands of schools in seismically active zones throughout the country are poorly built and vulnerable to earthquakes.

For the past several decades, Kasula has been involved in rebuilding poorly built schools and houses to ensure they are more earthquake-resistant, with the aim of reducing casualties in the event of a strong earthquake.

“There is no guarantee that anyone or anything is 100 percent safe in a big magnitude earthquake, but we can at least work towards reducing the [potential] damage,” Kasula told IRIN.

According to the Nepal National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET) - a major local civic group involved in earthquake disaster education and seismic risk reduction projects in Nepal - over a thousand schools in Kathmandu alone are at risk. None of the surveyed public and private school buildings complied with the prevailing seismic code, said NSET officials.

“This is really a worrisome situation given that Nepal ranks as the world’s 11th earthquake risk country,” said NSET engineer Ram Adhikary. He said his organisation was very alarmed to discover that most buildings were non-engineered, used traditional weak materials, had untied gable walls with heavy walls and roofs, and that most were elongated in plan. Adhikary said this was a recipe for disaster.

“Nepal has suffered at least 10 big earthquakes in the last 68 years,” said Adhikary, adding that a big one was due any time now, given recent earthquake patterns.

In 1934 a large earthquake killed over 17,000 people in one minute in both Nepal and the adjoining Indian state of Bihar. Most of those killed were in Kathmandu, according to NSET, which is concerned that an earthquake of similar magnitude today could kill over 100,000 people and destroy over 60 percent of the buildings in the capital alone.

“Schools… the most important focus”

Photo: Naresh Newar/IRIN

Many poorly built houses in Nepal, like this one in Kathmandu, are highly vulnerable to earthquakes

In the 1988 earthquake in Udaypur District, nearly 400km southeast of Kathmandu, about 6,000 schools were destroyed, but children were lucky that the earthquake took place out of school hours, NSET specialists said. Over 300,000 children had been unable to attend their schools for several months following the quake.

“Not all hope is lost and all we have to do is to educate people on the importance of seismically strengthened buildings and a preparedness plan,” said Kasula, who, along with other trainers from NSET, has trained over 4,000 people in Nepal.

However, for disaster safety experts, strengthening school buildings alone cannot help. There is a need to educate school children and teachers on how to prepare themselves, they say.

“Schools remain the most important focus for us since they serve as both shelter during earthquakes as well as a good medium through which to spread awareness,” said NSET Director Ram Chandra Kandel, who explained that training and educating children on preparedness can help to disseminate information to the community.

“Already, this methodology is already proving to be quite successful in mass education through school teachers and students,” said Kandel.

Lack of awareness

Experts are worried that even many educated professionals, including medical personnel, lack awareness on how to protect themselves in the event of an earthquake. The concern is that many institutions have no contingency plans regarding how to respond if thousands of people are injured, roads destroyed and hospitals overwhelmed.

Earlier this week, a group of local earthquake disaster preparedness teams tested a hospital to highlight that lack of preparedness. They staged an incident by rushing 15-20 “severely injured” patients to a renowned public hospital, and caused huge panic among doctors who seemed totally unprepared. That was just an exercise but a lesson for the doctors, who were furious at first but later appreciated there was a very important lesson to be learned.

“Our job is to make sure every resident is absolutely prepared and aware about earthquakes, as we never know when one might occur… even right now,” said Kandel.

Kandel gave a shocking scenario of what might happen if the current scale of unpreparedness were to continue. His technical team said that if the current lack of intervention - poor education on earthquakes and failure to make schools earthquake-resistant - were to persist, a major earthquake could kill or severely injure some 29,000 schoolchildren in Kathmandu and destroy over 77 percent of its schools.
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