"What would you rather do?" I asked Suman Ghimire, the Head of the District Development Office. "Build one new school block or retrofit three so that they're safer in an earthquake?"
He squirmed, citing the technical nature of the question. Face contorted, he looked out the window of his office at the haphazard construction of the District Capital, Ilam. Eventually he responded, knowing it was not the right answer. "I think I would build a new one"This is part of the challenge we face. I've been working with four junior engineers from the Department of Urban Development and Building Construction (DUDBC) to develop a design for making schools safer. It needs to be both cost effective and robust enough to at least not collapse.
Retrofitting should cost 30% of rebuilding according to government guidelines. It has to be an excellent solution to be attractive to people like Suman. There's little point in fixing a few buildings if after we leave nobody deals with the other 90% of school blocks that are death-traps. We'll have to demonstrate its value and ease of construction to convince him.
There is no construction code of practice for doing this. No engineer could sign-off a building as "safe" after adding bandages to a mud and stone building. You just can't tell the weaknesses in the original construction. The only viable strategy is to make a significant improvement to the safety of the building.
So a pragmatic solution is needed. With the tiny funding that local government receives and the skill base in the district, there's no way that they could knock down and start again with hundreds of vulnerable buildings. Disagreeable choices are written in the expression of Binay Shrestha the regional chief engineer at the DUDBC as we discuss a way forward.
Thankfully, I think we've got there. Thanks to Binay's support a set of design principles that we've developed has been agreed by the DUDBC. It's the first such document for this kind of simple building - I'm relieved. The methodology has been shown to resist earthquakes in other countries so I'm as confident as I can be that it works.
At any point, this could have disappeared into a world of engineers' hand wringing and academic research. That's for another day. The first step is to run some pilots and work with the schools we've got. Hopefully, somewhere down the line, funding will be made available for research that pave the way for codifying this practice. Or something better.
Hi great post and important questions - spreading the make schools safe approach should be prioritised - do you share this with policy makers and engineers in Nepal - try to meet Kiran and BK (From Global Action Nepal) before you leave and also see if PTN and other schools being built are earthquake proof - good luck with it all - question is how much can you get done before you leave and how can you spread your legacy of common sense nationally !! now there's a challenge :-)
ReplyDeleteIn theory the design was developed by the department of urban development and building construction. In reality I gave a lot of guidance to the engineers contracted for the job as they were still starting off in their careers. So the design is now signed-off by policy makers if not accepted into code or common practice. We're hoping that we'll be able to lead the way with common practice.
ReplyDeleteWe are currently looking at an extension to the programme and looking for local partners to deliver it. So may well get in touch with Kiran and BK - although on the construction side it's more likely to be someone like NSET or similar (do you know of anyone similar?).