Vulnerable schools
Schools are used worldwide to temporarily accommodate the people displaced by natural disasters. But in Nepal, the poor state of school buildings has rendered them useless for this purpose, besides putting millions of school children at risk.
The 6.8 Richter scale earthquake on September 18 this year proved that school buildings in the country are highly vulnerable, and school children are more prone to casualties. Half of the total 2,000 structures damaged or destroyed during the quake were school buildings in the eastern districts. It was a similar case during the 1988 earthquake that had its epicentre in Udayapur district, where 6,000 schools were destroyed. Thankfully, the quake hadn’t taken place during school hours. Still, the damage disrupted school attendance of thousands of children for several months.
According to a study carried out last year by the National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET), a NGO working for earthquake awareness and preparedness, around 110,000 students could be killed if an earthquake with an intensity equal to that of the
1934 quake were to erupt during school hours. “Our study shows only 10 percent of the schools are earthquake resistant at present,” says Surya Prasad Acharya, chief of School Safety Department at the NSET.
After an earthquake, undamaged schools can play a crucial role in rehabilitating the displaced. As schools are spread throughout communities, they can be used as temporary shelters for the homeless or as medical clinics. But schools, including those in the Capital, are in severe need of retrofitting.
A survey carried out by the NSET in 2005 in one-third of the Kathmandu Valley’s public schools—643 in all—showed over 66 percent of the schools were likely to collapse in an earthquake with intensity IX on the modified Mercalli Scale. A quake of that scale, and during school hours, may kill more than 29,000 students and teachers (12 percent of the total public school occupants) and injure 43,000 (18 percent of the total public school occupants) in the Valley alone. Direct losses in terms of damaged buildings would amount to more than seven million dollars.
In the wake of increasing alarm, the Department of Education (DoE), in collaboration with the NSET, has started retrofitting in many public schools in the Valley. Maha Shram Sharma, director general at the DoE, says around 50 schools will be retrofitted in the fiscal year 2011/12.
“We are aware of the vulnerability of the public school buildings, which is why we aim to retrofit around 900 schools in the Valley within the next five years,” says Sharma. The cost to retrofit all the Valley schools is estimated to be around six million dollars at the rate of Rs 500 per square feet.
Posted on: 2011-12-27 08:56
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