KARACHI, Nov 19: Speakers at a seminar here on Saturday stressed the need for formulating a national disaster management system to ensure timely action for safety of people in case of an earthquake or a disaster and subsequent destruction of buildings.

They said the system should operate from federal, provincial, town and community level in a coordinative and integrated manner with an updated information.

They maintained that new building laws be formulated and implemented, ensuring better building construction as, at present, in most of the cases building laws are not implemented.

Entitled “Shattered lives: buildings in earthquake zones and safety”, the seminar was organized by the Shehri, with the collaboration of Helpline Trust. Provincial Minister for Planning & Development Shoaib Bukhari was the chief guest.

A number of experts including Naeem Sadiq (Citizen), Nooruddin Ahmed (civil engineer), Mushtaq Dawood (structural engineer) and Qazi Faez Isa identified certain critical issues, including current building laws and their quality.

Some of the speakers were critical of the appointment of army officials on civilian jobs, such as relief commissioner and authority of construction and rehabilitation work, saying this practice has tarnished the image of the military. They argued that civilians who have required skills and expertise could have done these jobs in a better way.

On the other hand, they said “these practices have created a wedge between the civilian society and the army” and have helped promote corruption in society.

They expressed the view that a seismic zone map be prepared for the country, dividing it into different seismic zones which should reflect the risk of earthquake.

They also observed that seismic codes in respect of different seismic zones be prepared detailing the planning, designing and building structures by taking into account the accepted level of seismic risk, building typologies, and material and methods used in construction.

Moreover, a mechanism be devised to enforce and implement these codes in actual construction and no exception to the applicability of the building codes be permitted. They particularly emphasized that government buildings, including schools, must not be exempted.

They opined that if any deviation in the structural design is required, construction be immediately stopped and only resumed once approval of the new design has been obtained after ensuring its complete compliance with the applicable code.

The speakers also suggested that top heavy or ground storey, where ground floor or basement is hallow and is used for parking or storage, should be discouraged, as such buildings have proven extremely vulnerable in earthquake shaking.

They also said that buildings should not be permitted to be built adjacent to one another as they pound on each other during a strong earthquake and the one may also may have an impact on the other.

They further recommended that there should be good structural configuration in the buildings’ shape, size and structural system carrying loads to an extent that they should ensure a direct and smooth flow of inertia forces to the ground and thereby symmetry should be encouraged with uniformly distributed mass.