Quake was feared because of the congested city structure
stranded: Tourists wait outside Kathmandu airport as air services were hit following an aftershock on Sunday. (Photo: AFP)
Kathmandu: Strange it may sound but, a week ago, about 50 earthquake and social scientists from around the world came to Kathmandu to figure out how to get this congested, and shoddily built area to prepare better for a big earthquake, a repeat of the 1934 temblor that leveled this city. They knew they were racing against the clock, but they didn’t know when it would strike.
“It was a sort of nightmare waiting to happen,” said seismologist James Jackson, head of the earth sciences department at the University of Cambridge in England. “Physically and geologically what happened is exactly what we thought would happen.”
But he didn’t expect the massive quake that struck on Saturday to happen so soon. “I was walking through that very area where that earthquake was and I thought at the very time that the area was heading for trouble,” said Jackson, lead scientist for Earthquakes Without Frontiers, a group that tries to make Asia more able to bounce back from these disasters and was having the meeting.
A Kathmandu earthquake has long been feared, not just because of the natural seismic fault, but because of the local, more human conditions that make it worse.
The same size quake can have bigger effects on different parts of the globe because of building construction and population and that’s something the U.S. Geological Survey calculates ahead of time.
So the same level of severe shaking would cause 10 to 30 people to die per million residents in California, 1,000 or may be more in Nepal, and up to 10,000 in parts of Pakistan, India, Iran and China, said USGS seismologist David Wald.
While the trigger of the disaster is natural — an earthquake — “the consequences are very much man-made,” Mr Jackson said. “It’s buildings that kill people and not earthquakes,” he added.
( Source : AFP )
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