Earthquakes in Nepal: Unlearned and undocumented
By Dipendra Gautam
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Most of the current curricula do not really address the demand of our time and location. For instance, an engineering professor from a reputed university was forced to pull down his wooden house constructed after the Gorkha earthquake due to a subsidy issue. He was forced to choose brick masonry as the engineers refused to believe that wooden buildings are also earthquake-resistant. This comes as no surprise as I have even witnessed a brick masonry construction just below the Shailung Mountain in Dolakha district right in front of a timber factory.
A grave challenge of our time is also wrong consultations. Our manpower is trained into believing that if people were to follow the templates, their lives' safety would be guaranteed. Making people aware of the probabilities [of death and destruction] during an earthquake would be more sagacious than telling them their houses are earthquake-resistant, which is a relative term and should be understood differently for different scenarios.
Following directions and being alert are the only ways to cope with natural hazards. However, as mentioned earlier, most people forget an earthquake after six months. The technical manpower does not focus on cutting-edge research regarding construction and design innovation. Most of the Nepali structural forms are yet to be discovered, thus their behaviours during earthquakes would just be a prediction. Our research group covered some 13 vernacular building technologies from Dho-Tarap in the high mountains to Triveni of the Terai, and made a presentation on the vulnerability of the buildings last year. We have yet to understand the future of buildings in western Nepal during an earthquake due to their inherent vulnerabilities, which are associated with construction systems and a lack of periodic strengthening.
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