By IANS,
New Delhi : Hundreds of Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) engineers will be trained by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) to spot unsafe buildings in the national capital and strengthen them to withstand tremors.
“A curriculum is designed by NDMA with the help of IIT experts to train MCD engineers. We are roping around 240 engineers. They will be trained to assess the number of unsafe buildings in the city and take steps to strengthen them, so that the damage can be minimised in case of an earthquake,” NDMA vice chairman M. Shashidhar Reddy told IANS.
Reddy also said that a meeting will be held Monday with MCD officials on training its engineers. “The training will be conducted batch-wise, each batch will have about 50 engineers and the training period will be about 4 to 5 days.”
Recalling the 7.9-magnitude Gujarat earthquake Jan 26, 2001, with its epicentre near Bhuj, Reddy said that the maximum damage to property was caused due to unsafe buildings.
“It is important to find the number of unsafe buildings in Delhi and this training for MCD engineers will help them to easily identify such buildings, so they can know how safe are buildings in the city during tremors or aftershocks,” Reddy said.
As per seismological experts, earthquakes above 5 on the Richter scale can cause major damage in the national capital. In the seismic zone mapping done by the Geological Survey of India (GSI), Delhi is among 30 cities in the country falling in Zone IV, which is defined as a severe intensity seismic zone.
“The training programme for the civic body engineers will be on Rapid Visual Screening (RVS) which will enable them to assess how safe any building in the city would be during tremors or aftershocks. NDMA joining hands with IIT experts in this RVS method has come out with a detailed building typology method for the whole country,” Reddy said.
RVS is a method, which can easily identify and rank residential buildings that are potentially seismically hazardous. The RVS procedure will consider different building types, based on the building materials and construction types.
“Delhi is prone to frequent mild tremors – with hundreds of tall buildings and senseless construction of buildings, we need to take effective and quick actions in regard to earthquake-resistant buildings,” a senior NDMA official pleading anonymity told IANS.
A tremor, measuring 4.9 on the Richter Scale with Haryana’s Bahadurgarh as epicentre, shook Delhi and neighbouring towns Monday. According to the India Meteorological Department (IMD), Monday’s tremor was the third tremor in Delhi since September last year.
“Countries like Japan are at the forefront of earthquake resistance with modern structures and have stringent rules for short, medium and tall buildings. We should at least follow some basic things. For instance, a one foot distance between two buildings should be maintained,” the earthquake expert in NDMA, added.