|
|
|
| November 24, 2005 | Thursday | Shawwal 21, 1426 |
Nepalese team in Muzaffarabad
MUZAFFARABAD, Nov 23: Four members of a Nepalese NGO, specializing in earthquake-resistant constructions, arrived here on Wednesday under the aegis of a United Nations agency for training local engineers in their area of expertise. “Our society is working for earthquake risk mitigation and we have come here to train, educate and raise the level of awareness about technical developments and earthquake-resistant constructions,” said Jitendra Kumar Bothara, the team leader and earthquake engineer in the National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET).
The United Nations Development Programme had invited the NSET, which, according to Mr Bothara, has experience of working in different quake-hit regions of the world, such as Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Indonesia and India.
“Our goal is to see the damage, analyse the type of buildings and construction methodology and develop some sort of mechanism to improve the constructions,” he told Dawn at the site of a ravaged hotel near the confluence of rivers Neelum and Jhelum.
Mr Bothara’s colleagues — earthquake technology specialist Bijay Upadhyay, structural engineer Surya Narayan Shrestha and civil engineer Ram Chandra Kandel — were with him.
Earthquake, Mr Bothara said, might continue to occur in the area but the real problem was unsafe constructions which were causing deaths and destructions.
“We believe it’s not earthquakes but unsafe buildings that kill people and, therefore, we press upon the people to work together towards safe building construction.”
Earlier, the team went round in some parts of the city with the officials of the AJK public works department’s central design office and the UNDP. Mr Bothara said they would tour the remaining quake-it areas in the coming days. Answering a question, he said there was no need to demolish the less damaged and standing structures as they could be made stronger through seismic retrofitting to withstand future tremors.
However, the building agencies would have to first examine such structures and judge if the retrofitting process was cost- effective or not, he said.
Recalling their experience back home, Mr Bothara said the cost of earthquake-resistant building was 10 per cent more than that of normal construction.
Answering another question, he said they would stay in the AJK by the end of February and would conduct training programmes for local engineers, masons, contractors and self-builders.
|
|
|
|
