2001 Gujarat temblor: What lessons have we learnt from it?

January 26, 2001, our Republic Day, turned out to be a day of unprecedented tragedy for thousands of residents of Bhuj and neighbouring villages in Kutch, Gujarat, for it was on this day, almost coinciding with the flag-hoisting ceremony in the morning that the most powerful earthquake in recent memory, of magnitude 7.9 on the Richter's scale, struck the region with such a devastating force that over 20,000 people lost their lives and several villages like Bhachau and Anjar were totally razed down without any vestige of their original prosperous living.

Not only that, the trail of devastation extended as far as Ahmedabad through many towns in Saurashtra and the shock was felt even in Mumbai, 700 km away. This then was the havoc wrought by the disastrous quake.

For all that, unlike the Latur-Osmanabad districts of Maharashtra which were believed to be immune to earthquake occurrence until the geoscientifc community was rudely woken up by a 6.5 M quake at Killari on September 30, 1993, the Kachch region was known to be highly seismic even in 1937 when it figured in the first Earthquake Map of India that appeared in a research paper which carried valuable information on earthquake-proof construction also.

It was pitiable therefore that, with all that valuable background information, the region still allowed itself to be ravaged by the unexpected and unwelcome visitor on that fateful January morning.  

This only goes to show the total lack of awareness among the public of earthquakes and how to go about protecting lives and property in our country. 

Sadly, the situation does not seem to have changed in all these ten long years.  

As for the awareness about earthquakes, it needs to be created with some serious effort by the government authorities since about one third of India falls in seismically vulnerable zones with several of our cities and towns facing the earthquake risk like Srinagar, Shimla, Delhi, Dehra Dun, Uttarkashi, Guwahati,  Shillong, Port Blair and Mumbai to mention a few.    

In recent years there have been three major quakes — the Latur quake of 1993, the Jabalpur quake of 1997 and the Bhuj tremor of 2001.  

Significantly, in all these places, there have been observable 'earthquake scars' on the ground left behind by the quakes like long cracks, displacements on the ground and roads, twisting of telegraph poles, rotation of bricks on the walls of wells, settlement and tilting of buildings, etc. Even if some of these have been lost with time, a few of them if still seen deserve to be preserved for posterity in what can be called 'field quake museums'.

This is what precisely the Americans have done in California which is their most highly seismic state due to the presence of the 'San Andreas Fault', an important geological feature of tremendous earthquake potential that runs all along the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles.  This 'fault' had brought about the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and can be traced on the ground as a long crack for its entire length. 

It had displaced several features in the region and some of them like the offset of a fence by some five metres at Point Raise has been preserved all these hundred years with proper annotations on boards fixed to the ground to enable any visitor to have a look at it and appreciate what the quake had done.  

Besides, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) issues several illustrated pamphlets on earthquakes for public consumption periodically and is constantly keeping the Californians focused on earthquakes with their research data that the next big quake is expected by 2030, most probably by 2015. The seismic awareness in USA is therefore quite high.

There is no reason why such an earthquake-awareness cannot   be created in our country in the interest of public safety
by our own Geological Survey of India and other government agencies.

The other part pertains to building our houses conforming to standard specifications and adopting special designs to make them resistant to earthquakes.  Such techniques have been there for more than seventy years now and these should be employed without fail to see that the buildings are not damaged by earthquake waves since nothing else can be done to survive the quakes which are neither predictable nor preventable. 

It needs to be emphasised here that the heavy death tolls in interior Maharashtra during the Latur quake (10,000) and in Kachch during the Bhuj quake (20,000) were entirely due to extremely poor construction of the houses using basalt rock boulders and mud and sandstone with similar mud respectively.  

In contrast, reasonably good construction even if it was not anything special in Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh had ensured that the death toll was only about sixty during the quake of 1997.   This should serve as an eye-opener for the whole country.  

Existing buildings can also be seismically strengthened using appropriate methods available for the same.  At the moment the degree of awareness and the intent to adopt life-saving construction techniques among the public  appear to be nonexistent from all accounts.  Both these need to be attended to on a war footing.