11-10-05

The earthquake worldview

And down came the huge building -- a building which was a coveted living area earlier -- like a house of cards

Dr. Tariq Rahman

They believed that the earth rests upon the horns of a bull and when the bull shakes them, earthquakes occur. They now believe that the earth has tectonic plates and when these move, energy in the form of seismic waves is released and sets the surface of the earth in motion. This is the scientific explanation of the earthquake. In the days of the bull, human beings could do nothing; in the days of the seismic waves they can make buildings which do not collapse even when the earthquake is strong (even 7.6 on the Richter scale). But the morning of October 8 and the time of 8.55 am will remain etched on the memory of everybody in this country, or at least the northern part of it, forever. That was the day when we saw the ground, which we experienced as being firm, shake like a leaf. I recall bringing my daughter down from her room on the first floor. We only had to walk down a flight of stairs but the stairs were shaking and I had to clutch at the banisters to steady myself. This was the day when the Margalla Towers went down with a roar such as nobody could have imagined. It was as if the monsters locked up in the bowels of earth were rising up in fury to be let out. And down came the huge building -- a building which was a coveted living area earlier -- like a house of cards. As news poured in, telephones rang frantically but I found no reply from Muzaffarabad.

That is where the earth monsters had really gone berserk in their fury. At night the clouds loomed up from nowhere and the people on the streets of Muzaffarabad had to avoid the streets but where could they go? Shock waves had been felt all day and the buildings, if they were still standing, looked like death traps. Meanwhile news came from all over the country of roofs collapsing and school children injured and traumatised even as far as Lahore. It was like a country devastated by an attack of the aliens.

This earthquake brings out a few facts about our worldview, civic amenities and preparedness for mishaps. It emerges that we still live in the age of the bull and have not graduated to the scientific view that there are such things as movements of the tectonic plates and something can be done about the seismic waves these produce. Millions of years back, the plate of South Asia came and hit the Eurasian plate.

The shock was so immense that it created the huge Himalayan Mountains. This was not the end of the story: the South Asian plate still moves into the Eurasian plate about 1.6 inches every year. This causes quakes but they usually originate from the Hindukush Mountains and not from the Mansehra area. This quake originated from the Mansehra area and so Muzaffarabad, Abbottabad and even Islamabad were so badly hit.

Pakistan is divided into four zones according to the kind of seismic disturbances they can expect. The most vulnerable is Balochistan around Quetta. Northern Punjab and the NWFP are also affected. Karachi too is vulnerable. In fact in 1945 there was an earthquake which sent 12 metres of waves along the Makran coast. It too was said to be of nearly 7.9 on the scale constructed by Charles Richter.

So, with all this information, how do we behave? We still construct buildings as if the chance of the bull shaking his horns was something we can do nothing about. In Japan and California they construct buildings designed not to collapse in most earthquakes. This they do by making the base separate from the main building by putting in movable and flexible material. They also use steel and wood and the walls are sometimes supported by steel supports from outside. When I was at Berkeley, I noticed that the buildings of the university were all made of steel girders. Even the tall Sather Tower, from which one can see all Berkeley, parts of Oakland and even San Francisco with the Golden Gate as its main landmark lying in a breathtaking panorama below, is made of steel girders.

The houses were made of wood but there was an authority to check whether the standard of the wood was safe or not. Even this does not guarantee complete safety (as the Kobe earthquake suggests) so there is no such thing as a completely earthquake-proof building. However, there is reasonable guarantee that the building would withstand most earthquakes. Of course there are other dangers, such as that of fire, in very strong earthquakes and that is why the city authorities have to be prepared for all types of contingencies.

In Islamabad, there was little awareness, at least in building practices, that this was a seismic zone. One hears that the Margalla Towers was constructed in violation of building rules. It was supposed to be of ten stories but it had twelve.

There are other news reports saying that the building material was substandard. I wonder if the CDA is not responsible for checking just these sorts of things. One does not understand what good it is for those who have died or have been paralysed or maimed for life to know that the completion certificate had never been issued.

This is mere bureaucratic jargon. What would have mattered is if the flats had never been allowed to be sold and nobody had occupied them. The people buying the flats or hiring them do not know if the CDA has issued some certificate or not. Certificates are nothing if they are not enforced; if they do not prevent what they are meant to prevent. One also hears that many other tall buildings have developed cracks. If lives are to be saved then all of them should be reconstructed no matter what it costs. And for the future, our engineers should learn from the kind of things they do in Japan and California. We should either have safe high rise buildings or none at all. And this goes for Lahore (remember the Kangra quake of 1905) and Karachi too which can face earthquakes.

Indeed, Karachi which has buildings built on sand and with the most defective material possible will be almost wiped out of existence. Of course Quetta and Peshawar might be safe without any high rise buildings at all.

Then there is the matter of how to deal with emergencies. There are such things as the National Crisis Management Cell of the Ministry of the Interior. However, the UNDP reviewed the disaster management policies in January 2005 and found them defective. This is obvious everywhere. No building, least of all educational institutions, has any standing orders on how to react to emergencies. No drills are carried out and nobody knows how to behave in an emergency. Some institutions did not allow the students to leave rooms to go outside and some simply sent them home when their parents could not collect them. This kind of behaviour caused immense damage when the Ojhri Camp ammunition blew up in April 1988. It has caused even more damage this time.

This is taught in some countries and it lies well within the realm of the possible. It is time we gave up ad hocism and send in the army in every emergency. One is grateful to the army for help as one is to the Edhi Foundation and private philanthropists and also foreign countries which have sent help. But there should be strong and reliable civilian institutions which should swing into action with ambulances, fire fighting engines and tractors as well as food and other necessities as soon as something like this happens.

In their absence, the people develop further mistrust in the civilian government which is not good if the desire for democracy is to be cherished and strengthened. Democracy must appear to work; civilian institutions must appear efficient. And it will not even appear to work if the civilian administration does not cater to all needs of the citizens.

So, while nothing can be done to prevent the tectonic plates from moving, much can be done to prevent this movement from causing the avoidable suffering which was witnessed on October 8, 2005. 

The author is a linguistic historian

Vulnerable mountains

M. Ismail Khan

The writer is a development analyst from Skardu, Northern Areas

A major earthquake had not occurred in the Himalayas for over a century. This "seismic gap", say Geologists, had made a high intensity earthquake in the region inevitable. Well, it has just hit Pakistan's part of Himalayas -- an entire apartment block in Islamabad uprooted, up in the north villages disappeared from the face of the earth, houses perched on mountain slopes tumbled down like nine pins, and so far thousands of human lives have been lost and countless are left wounded and homeless. The largest Earthquake to have struck Pakistan's mainly mountainous regions was unexpected but not entirely unaware. For quite some time experts and scientists have been talking of the vulnerability of the Himalayas mountain complex. Earthquakes do more in mountains; they trigger landslides, glacial lake outbursts and river damming, which can multiply the intensity of disaster.

In December 1974, the Kohistan district was the epicentre of a devastating quake that wiped out dozens of villages and killed people in thousands. In 2002 scores of villages were washed away by landslides triggered by series of tremors along the Karakoram Highway near Chilas and valleys adjacent to the Line of Control in Baltistan district. Hazara, Azad Kashmir, Murree and adjoining areas of Islamabad have also been experiencing sporadic tremors over the decades. Geologists have been insisting that once every 100 years a high intensity earthquake is most likely to occur along any section of the Himalayan chain. Based on continuous seismic activities in the Hindukush and Himalayas, but no one knew when it would be coming. Experts have been particularly concerned that if a big one were to strike now, the damage would be many times more than that caused by the earlier earthquake, as there has been a marked rise in population in the mountain areas during the last few decades.

Yet, no earthquake hazard zonation maps were prepared to delineate the earthquake's sensitive points. A proper zonation and disaster preparedness mechanism would have enabled faster and more effective reaction and recovery plan, and would have reduced the post disaster damage, particularly in the remote areas where communication infrastructures were also turned upside down by the quake measuring 7.6 magnitude.

The earthquake-hit areas are among the most vulnerable mountain regions in the world, it is here that the world's three highest mountain ranges converge. Geologically young and unstable, the Himalayas were formed when the Indian sub-continental plate drifted northwards and collided with Asia. Earthquakes happen when tectonic plates scrape past each other beneath the mountains. Rock strata bent by enormous forces beneath the Himalayas trigger thousands of small tremors every year. But once in a while there is a major crack as the internal pressures grows too much for the rocks to sustain, forcing the strata to snap. When that happens, it usually results in a Richter 7+ magnitude earthquake.

It is believed that the vertical nature of mountains makes its surface highly unstable and vulnerable to natural hazards including earthquakes. Due to the global warming and other changes, mountain areas have become even more dangerous, as melted permafrost and glacial runoff has accelerated soil erosion further raising the likelihood of post earthquakes landslides, floods and avalanches.

Given the regular seismic activities, more stringent building codes should have been introduced in all quake prone areas, including the thickly populated cities and towns like Abbotabad, Murree, Muzaffarabad, Gilgit, Skardu. Building code is almost an alien concept in the mountainous areas of Pakistan. Landslides, floods, earthquakes, and glacial lake out-burst floods are main natural hazards in the mountain areas. Though, the possible impacts of hazards vary from case to case, depending on a number of factors: for instance, a large landslide or an earthquake in a remote valley may have less impact than a small landslide or earthquake in a thickly populated town. In the Northern Areas and Azad Kashmir the codes prescribed by the municipal authorities are not taken seriously by the inhabitant. Calls to improve building regulations by including earthquake resistant measures have often been brushed aside by local official terming the experts fear mongers and alarmists. While Azad Kashmir has a rather empowered Assembly to look at such legislation, the Northern Areas Legislative Council is hardly in a position to grapple with such delicate issues.

Given the potential natural hazards people in the mountainous areas face, there should be a well trained and resourced "disaster management and mitigation" department. As the traditional mountain societies are getting sucked into the process of globalisation, and traditional wisdom and survival techniques are waning, there is a need to educate the younger lot about mountain specific natural hazards. No doubt that the people in the mountains have lived with such disasters in the past and have coped with it. In fact, they had devised indigenous responses to crises encountered in their peculiar environment. However, what they are up to now is a rapid, massive unregulated and uneven infrastructural boom, a process that has increased the magnitude of the crises with which their traditional responses can no longer cope.

Therefore, a more broad based and coordinated effort is required to manage the increasingly erratic situation faced by the mountain communities. Serious efforts are required to integrate key mountain specificities into the syllabus at school level; training and awareness imparted to young boys and girls will enable them to cope with natural hazards as and when it occurs. Most of the currently available human resources have been trained to tackle the issues based on case studies that greatly underestimate the mountain dimensions. The Geological changes, scale and frequency of earthquakes in the region far outstrip parameters laid out in existing textbooks prepared for comparatively different scenarios. Non-government organizations can also chip in by facilitating training and sanitization programmes through their networks and social mobilization campaigns. Hospital, extensions departments and emergency services should be geared to effectively cope with mountain specific natural hazards. This will eventually help developed local capacities to meet challenges of emergency created by calamities.

Weak laws, regulation and implementation mechanism concerning deforestation and depletion of pastures and watersheds in the mountain areas is adding to the destructiveness of the earthquakes. Effective watershed management will also help to minimize destruction being caused by natural hazards in future. Another important area which demands attention is the great risks and uncertainties of building dams in the high mountains; high altitude water reservoirs can pose serious threats to downstream areas in the event of a major earthquake. The proposed high altitude mega dam at Katzara in Skardu is a case in point. Although engineers insist that as long as the risks are known it can be managed. But the question is how much is it going to cost and if the risk, however minimal, is acceptable. Thirty years after they happened, reports are just filtering out now of dam bursts in south-central China that killed tens of thousands of people.

Like all major natural disaster, this earthquake has caught us off guard, nonetheless, we must acknowledge that yet again Pakistan army moved in swiftly and effectively and has done a great job in rescue actions all over the affected areas. But the challenge for disaster managers, planners, legislators and development workers is to work in tendon to find a mutually agreeable and long-term approach to mitigate and reduce the impact of natural hazards originating from mountain environments. While it may not be possible to control the occurrence of natural hazards, their impact can be reduced considerably by modifying current policy making and development patterns for protection of the highly vulnerable and fragile mountain ecosystems.

09-10-05

Shocks after the 'quake

Ghazi Salahuddin

An earthquake is a natural disaster that comes unannounced. So it was on Saturday morning when large areas in northern Pakistan experienced a devastating jolt. This, by all means, is a grave emergency that will fully test our capacity to deal with a national crisis. Indeed, the earthquake of the high intensity of 7.6 on Richter scale, with its epicentre about one hundred kilometres north of Islamabad, has cut across national frontiers and, specifically, the Line of Control in Kashmir. In Islamabad, the collapse of the Margalla Tower was the immediate focus of the unfolding tragedy.

What has happened is a shattering blow to the people and administration of Pakistan. It has come on the third day of Ramazan, at a time when the country was coming to terms with political tremors triggered by the final phase of the local government elections. On the second day of Ramazan, there was this shock of the killing of eight Qadiyanis while they were offering their early morning prayers in Mandi Bahauddin. This was another expression of primitive passions that religious extremism has inspired in the country. Unfortunately, all the professed initiatives taken by this government to deal with religious extremism have obviously not been very effective.

Irrespective of the significance of the allegedly rigged local elections on the political landscape of the country and the meaning of intermittent cases of religious terrorism, the earthquake has now momentarily demolished all other concerns. It is Kashmir that has borne the brunt of Saturday morning's seismic activity and the casualties are feared to be high. Relief operations are likely to be hampered by landslides and lack of adequate communication with the affected areas.

Since tremors were felt across a large area in the north, the experience is likely to enforce a sense of brotherhood. It is early to make any assessment of the losses in life and property that we will have to bear but it is surely a disaster that will reverberate in the lives of the people. Popular perceptions about the performance of authorities in dealing with the crisis may define the political mood in the country in months ahead. Already, the tremors and numerous after-shocks would have prompted the people to indulge in often reckless speculation.

Does it make any difference that this earthquake has struck in the early days of a month that entirely changes the rhythm of our lives and enforces a pious and religious environment? Perhaps the people will now be more willing to come forward to help the afflicted and contribute to relief efforts. In many minds, Saturday's catastrophe will excite images of the Asian Tsunami of December 26 last year and the recent, adequately forecast hurricanes on the Gulf coast of the United States, particularly in New Orleans.

It has been noticed that in the initial phase of such disasters, people tend to come together and go out of their way to help others. Gradually, though, anger may surge if the relief efforts are not seen to be satisfactory. In this case, there may be some momentous consequences because the earthquake has touched a region that has been a scene of bloody discord for many, many years. We may also include parts of Afghanistan, another territory that is deeply wounded because of human aberrations.

An earthquake, of course, does not respect any boundaries. In that sense, the forces of nature have assaulted Kashmir in an arbitrary manner. It is a terrain in which it might take days to even locate the settlements that may have been wiped out in the valleys of what was once admired as paradise on earth. As I write these lines, the Azad Kashmir seems to be in the eye of the calamity. Still, people on both sides of the Line of Control have surely shared this natural upheaval.

After Asian Tsunami -- and BBC promptly called it Asian 'Quake on Saturday morning -- there was some comment on whether it could change the world in the sense of how the damage would be repaired in an international aid relief. After all, entire humanity has to respond to a calamity that touches so many countries and leaves such a vast trail of death and destruction. In the same way, a time may come for us to ponder if Saturday's earthquake would have an impact on politics in the region.

Incidentally, the Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium has organised an international conference on the theme: "Philanthropy in Disasters: Tsunami and After". It is to be held in Phuket, Thailand, on November 28-30. I know because I hope to attend it to represent the Mir Khalil-ur-Rahman Foundation, an affiliation of the Jang Group of Newspapers. The Foundation has made a major contribution towards raising people's awareness about Tsunami, largely through Geo television broadcasts. Last month, Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman had presented a cheque of Rs40 million to Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz on behalf of the Foundation, to be forwarded to Sri Lanka for its re-construction activities.

I find this relevant because the campaign launched by our media, particularly by Geo, to collect donations for Tsunami and sensitise the citizens in that context was a useful learning experience and that can be put to use in dealing with the aftermath of the present disaster in Pakistan. In the initial days, though, the government must bear the responsibility of mobilising all its resources to deal with the crisis. There are bound to have been plans ready for such an emergency.

About the conference on philanthropy in disasters, I should add that it reflects a new concern for enhancing community-level disaster preparedness and to increase effectiveness of in-country philanthropic contributions. We know that Ramazan is a month in which the faithful are commanded to give and to look after the poor and the needy. With these pious urges, the relief effort at the national level should gain a high momentum very soon, provided that a proper structure for this is in place.

As I have said, the earthquake has pushed into the background the otherwise very important controversy of the final phase of local government polls. Here was an unabashed celebration of power in the context of its political uses on a day that launched a conspicuous phase of piety and moral rectitude. But, one might say, we hold our elections in the same manner that we embrace Ramazan: more in a ritualistic sense than in the true spirit of the exercise.

We can also assume that the planned protest by the opposition on October 12, the sixth anniversary of the arrival of General Pervez Musharraf, would not attract wide attention. Even otherwise, chances of a popular movement in Pakistan remain slim because of how the polity is fragmented and how the power has been exercised. Meanwhile, the issue of "dhandli" in Thursday's indirect polls has acquired a new dimension in the light of Maulana Fazlur Rahmen's confessions. He said that his party had about 575 councillors elected in the earlier phase but his nazim candidates won only about 120 votes -- the rest having sold their ballots.

If these derelictions will not ruffle any official feathers, can the after-shocks of the devastating earthquake make any difference? 

The writer is a staff member