Earthquakes are bad, not being properly prepared is worse

Afsan Chowdhury
Published : 10 Jan 2016, 07:10 AM
Updated : 10 Jan 2016, 07:10 AM

Nine people were killed in the Indian North-east where the earthquake of   4th January had its epicenter. More than a hundred were injured. Many parts of India were affected and so was Bangladesh.

However, in Dhaka alone 15 people died as a result of panic and anxiety related to the earthquake. There is no definite information on the injured, but the number is high. Several buildings were badly hit and a few have tilted dangerously.

Dhaka is not the epicenter of any quakes for long, but disaster as a result of haphazard and poor disaster preparedness and building management makes it a dangerous city to live in, even when it's not in the direct route of a visiting earthquake.

What makes Dhaka so vulnerable is not nature, but human neglect.

Although Dhaka or Bangladesh is wreathed by tectonic faults all around it, it hasn't been hit by large tremors. Nayeem Wahra of Disaster Forum has said that, the main threat to lives is not from such faults but the dangerous building constructions within.

In other words it's not nature that is growling to kill, but the lawlessness of our builders and the very weak governance system of building and housing which is supposed to be responsible for making our lives safe and secure.

There is no scale to measure political or governmental irresponsibility. It's at the highest level. While we scramble to find out what the quakes measure on the Richter scale, it should be better to ask what the failure of governance measures on the Richter scale in our country.

Dhaka University's geology expert Prof. ASM Woobaidullah told bdnews24.com that there had been instances of powerful quakes in Sylhet in 1918, and later in the Sirajganj-Bogra region.

But no recent earthquake had its epicenter in Bangladesh.

He said the Manipur fault, besides the Dauki and Modhupur faults in Bangladesh, is quite active. These places often experience mild to medium tremors that do not find media mention.

"It is true that we are at risk. But there is no point panicking over this. The creation of awareness and the maintenance of preparedness are vital tasks. There must be joint efforts in this direction at the government and private levels."

"Earthquakes will keep occurring. Consternation should not be created among the people regarding them. Instead, they should be equipped to rescue those who survive a disaster."

Where is the danger?

Dhaka suffers from two critical vulnerabilities. It's a victim of unplanned urbanisation which has made the city extremely overpopulated. And so the demand for housing is extremely high.

This is natural but it's not happening according to plans. So completely unsupervised buildings have popped up, which are death traps people step in lacking any other options.

But the authorities, while accepting that potential dangers exist, say they are prepared.

Disaster Management Department Director General Riaz Ahmed has said that considerable preparations have been made, although earthquakes give no early warnings and there is no way to prevent them.

Arrangements are in place to provide medical treatment, clear debris, and mount swift rescue operations, he has mentioned.

There is however many reasons to be skeptical of such assurances. The Rana Plaza and other garments disasters are one.

The failed rescue attempt of the boy who fell down though a deep tube-well shaft in Dhaka and couldn't be rescued alive is another.

To say that we are adequately prepared is close to being in a state of denial about what can happen and what we are able to do to reduce disaster and mitigate its impact.

Few would agree that we are behaving like a people who may possibly be devastated by a major quake nearby. Until a quake rocks us we drift into happy oblivion and that's how it remains.

Much of the media interest is sensational in nature and centre around dire speculation and prediction of how many thousands of buildings will collapse and how large the disaster will be.

Few are able to put any serious pressure on the authorities on better preparedness.

Granted that things have progressed in the last few years, the pace remains extremely inadequate.

The biggest threat is a lack of priority in the disaster management sector as a whole. The kind of urgency and sense of emergency that earthquake preparedness requires is not there, and no one has said we are prepared except those whose paid job is to say so.

The examples we see everyday hardly makes us feel safe and when even a small disaster strikes we fail to respond adequately, as Rana plaza and other tiny examples have shown.

But the worst news is that we are adding to the problem everyday by failing to manage the chaotic migration, building construction, and the legal obligation to ensure safe buildings by enforcing building codes.

We seem to be convinced that God knows all about it and will take care of the problem and all we have to do is to wait for the earthquake and see divine miracles at work.

But it's the Devil which has been so hard at work and that is why we fear not the shaking earth, but the system that allows deadly buildings to be constructed as power and money work together to create a scenario deadlier than the worst earthquake in the world.