Nepali experts reach Pakistan to help quake victims

Four members of a Nepali NGO, specializing in earthquake-resistant constructions, arrived Muzaffarabad—the Pakistani city devastated by a powerful earthquake last month-- 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,” Dawn, a leading newspaper, quoted Jitendra Kumar Bothara, the team leader and earthquake engineer at the National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET), as saying.

The United Nations Development Programme had invited the NSET, which has already worked 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,” Bothara told Dawn at the site of a ravaged hotel near the confluence of rivers Neelum and Jhelum.

Bohara’s colleagues — earthquake technology specialist Bijay Upadhyay, structural engineer Surya Narayan Shrestha and civil engineer Ram Chandra Kandel — were with him.

Earthquake might continue to occur in the area but the real problem was unsafe constructions which were causing deaths and destructions, said Bohara. “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,” he added.

Earlier, the team went round in some parts of the city with the officials of the Azad Kashmir public works department’s central design office and the UNDP. The Nepali team would tour the remaining quake-it areas in the coming days. Bothara 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.

The team would stay in the region for the next three months and conduct training programmes for local engineers, masons, contractors and self-builders, the newspaper report said. nepalnews.com by Nov 25 05