Saturday’s earthquake measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale has brought complete devastation in three countries with death toll estimated to be well over 30,000 in Pakistan alone. The earthquake, centering round Pakistani Kashmir, flattened dozens of villages. More devastating than any terrorist attacks, it killed farmers, homemakers, soldiers and schoolchildren. According to seismologists, the area stretching across Pakistan into India and Afghanistan is a hotbed for seismic activity that erupts each time the Indian subcontinent slams into Asia. It is also the same type of collision that formed the Himalayas, millions of years ago as any student of geography would have learned.
As per the map prepared by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) Zone V—facing the greatest threat to such earthquakes—include all of North-Eastern India and where earthquakes with magnitudes in excess of 7.0 have occurred. Accordingly Nagaland would also fall under Zone V and it should surprise no one if a major earthquake were to take place, because the area by itself falls under a highly seismic one. Facts may be scary but the point to be understood is that another major earthquake in the region only looks inevitable. The question is when?
No amount of human ingenuity can prevent earthquakes from happening because it is a natural phenomenon that has to happen as in life and death. But one point that we can take into consideration is to take pre-emptive measures to prevent large scale damage. There is an important lesson one is taught in school that earthquakes do not kill but building does! This should be the central point when it comes to disaster management relating to earthquakes. An earthquake of magnitude 7.2 in Japan did not kill anybody. The sole death was due to rise in blood pressure of the person. In 1999 an earthquake of similar magnitude in Turkey took a death toll of about 25,000 thousand lives. There have been cases from Algeria, Morocco and Egypt where medium-magnitude earthquakes (magnitude less than 6.5) caused heavy destruction. These examples reiterate the fact that earthquake does not kill; it is the man-made structures that kill people. And, if these structures are built to withstand the shaking caused by earthquakes (as is the case in Japan), we will be able to save lives of thousands of people.
While coping with disasters such as earthquakes the role of mitigation is the only sensible thing to do. Proper mitigations would help in reducing the effects of the disaster. Another reason why this is important is because even with the advance of science and technology seismologists are currently unable to predict earthquakes. There can be no final answer or solution to such a thing as an earthquake. Only its mitigation can be addressed and the sooner we do it the better. Here, the government is in the best position to introduce suitable measures so that our towns and localities are ‘engineered’ to take on earthquakes. For this, the district level administration would have to formulate rules, regulations for the design and construction of quake-proof structures as is the practice in other parts of the country and abroad.
