Schools, Skills and Study

Sanjib, the headmaster of Diyalo Secondary School in Ilam surveyed the new school block he was building next to the one he was just finishing with funding and technical support from Save the Children. The building site looked smart, I asked him if he would be transferring the same earthquake resistant practice on the new school:

“Definitely” he replied “same materials, same techniques, but better this time”.

He had learned from some mistakes but knew from the buildings that had collapsed that it was worth the extra investment.

Save the Children construction at Diyalo School
with the next building in the foreground

Since the earthquake, Save the Children have rebuilt 36 school blocks using the standard government approved design. A small proportion of the buildings that were damaged, but hopefully by spreading the work across a wide and difficult geographic area, we have also spread a message about safer building.

And that message is important. In Pakistan in 2005 over 18,000 children were killed when poorly constructed schools collapsed during an earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter Scale.
Seismologists say that Nepal gets an earthquake 10 to 100 times the strength of that every 80 years. The last one was in 1934.

The important thing is that we build on the local way of building so that the good practice can impact more deeply into society. Stone and mud is cheap and abundantly available so it's the building material of choice for single storey buildings.

To support projects like this across Eastern Nepal, the UN Development Programme has trained over 900 masons in the region to include the vital earthquake resistant features that prevent or at least mitigate collapse.

Vertical reinforcement at wall junctions
are encased in  concrete

It's not hi-tech. Simple things like steel reinforcement encased placed at the wall junctions with concrete poured around it and reinforced concrete stitches at key horizontal levels will go a long way to making a wall safer.

There are other materials available, but bamboo takes a level of skill that isn't widely available, besides being poor acoustically and thermally. Timber houses are the traditional way of building, but it's discouraged these days as deforestation is causing more and more landslides.

We had learned the hard way that it wasn't easy to get permission from the forestry commission to cut down trees for the 5 inch timber cross sections needed for our roof trusses. The steel alternative needed repairing after it got bent and battered as it was trucked to the road head and then carried for two or three days to site.

It's not easy building to a decent quality around these parts. But everyone acknowledges that we have raised the bar in terms of construction standards. The plan is that when the next quake comes  buildings and people will be better prepared.