In the aftermath of Nepal Earthquake – The Dilemma of a Structural Engineer

Courtesy: Noelle Soren and David Soren, 2008

While browsing through internet pages and social media, I came across this picture and it somehow got stuck in my mind. These skeletons were found by two archeologists, David Soren and Noelle Soren in the mid-1980s in a Roman house in Kourion, Cyprus. They are believed to be killed during an earthquake that struck Kourion in 365 AD. The picture includes a family of three, showing a mother cradling an infant in her arms as the father trying to protect them from the falling debris. Being a structural engineer, I felt this picture posing a question to me, what we have achieved in last 2000 years in terms of being resilient to earthquakes?

So in a quiet evening, while sitting alone in office, I start trying to somehow satisfy these three souls, telling them about our advanced nonlinear structural modeling techniques, seismic analysis procedures and earthquake resistant design of buildings. Of course, the knowledge of seismic activities and associated loss of lives and property, expanded exponentially over the last few decades but can we really claim to be victorious over these monsters? To what extent we are more confident about our safety compared to 2000 years back? After every big event, Mother Nature answers these questions in a manner hard to digest.

Being born and raised in Pakistan, a seismically active part of the world, the fear of earthquakes was always a definite part of my cultural memory. However the most unforgettable experience was a 7.6 magnitude Kashmir earthquake on October 8th, 2005 which jolted the northern part of country, turning thousands of small houses in to rubble. Innumerable residential and commercial buildings were collapsed catastrophically rendering more than half a million homeless survivors beside an official figure of 90,000 deaths. The day was also my first day of undergraduate studies in Civil Engineering. While working with emergency relief agencies, I can remember the painful sights of damaged structures in areas where more than 90% of the people believed that it happened because someone on the skies is not happy with them. I can still remember how hard was it to explain a poor villager why he should not built an unreinforced stone masonry wall again for his house. How surprised was he listening to my words. How could he be sitting for whole of his life on a time-bomb which can explode any time, on the boundary of Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates? Those visuals somehow refused to disband from my mind.