Appropriate reconstruction vital to prevent future disaster - planners

Across the quake-devastated area of Mansehra and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, concrete beams, steel bars and piles of brick lie everywhere. Experts now surveying the situation have little doubt that the widespread use of such materials, in a quake-prone zone with unstable ground conditions, contributed to the death toll in the quake which is now officially put at over 54,000. Flat, concrete roofs, multi-storeyed school buildings and heavy pillars are only now being rejected as completely inappropriate materials for building in this region so susceptible to natural disasters. Even local people seem aware of this, with Shabbir, 79, telling IRIN as he stood by his village on the outskirts of Muzzafarabad, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir: "The traditional Kashmiri structures, made of wooden poles, straw and light beams in the roofs, did the least damage. The largest number of people died when they were trapped under heavy concrete." This partially explains why many of the dead are school children, many of them caught in buildings a number of storeys high with no attempt to incorporate any earthquake protection. Many civil servants, working in poorly constructed government buildings, died for similar reasons. "We know the terrain of this area and what our elders said. They had experienced quakes before. But the young do not listen. They just want magnificent buildings, like the ones they see in Lahore or Karachi," said Shabbir. Town planners and architects across the country have been emphasising the need to ensure that reconstruction in the quake zone is carried out in a manner aimed at ensuring homes and buildings can withstand future earthquakes. Leading town planner Arif Hassan, who helped carry out work in model community-based projects such as the Orangi Pilot Project in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi, has called for village communities to be fully involved in reconstruction and for materials to be selectively salvaged from the piles of rubble that stand everywhere in villages and towns obliterated in the earthquake. "The scale of this disaster is far too big to be dealt with by building model villages or pre-fabricated houses," Hasan recently wrote in a detailed assessment of the situation. According to a 1998 housing census in Pakistan, there were more than 807,000 houses or dwellings in the 12 earthquake-affected districts of Pakistan-held Kashmir and the affected parts of North West Frontier Province (NWFP). At least 50 percent of these are estimated to have collapsed. Others are too badly damaged to salvage. Reconstruction as such will be a truly mammoth undertaking. But as plans continue to be made, it is obvious that the preferences of communities will need to be taken fully into account. "We will build only on our own land. We will clear the rubble and restart as soon as winter ends," said Said Khan, a farmer in the Allai area of Battagram district. He fiercely opposed government plans to shift communities to other, possibly safer areas.