ResilienceCorruption, lax building codes exacerbate natural disasters in poor countries

While all heavily populated earthquake zones face the challenge of preparing for inevitable but unpredictable quakes, the poorest zones face the most risk as they invest less in building resilience and safe construction practices. The 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Nepal in April revealed to many building engineers and seismologist, failures by builders in Nepal to reinforce buildings to withstand even the most moderate quakes.

“They didn’t need this, but it was inevitable, absolutely inevitable,” said Richard Sharpe, a New Zealand earthquake engineer who led a team that formulated Nepal’s only set of building standards twenty years ago.

Part of the issue is corruption, according to residents and building experts. They claim that developers who build unlicensed buildings know that they will rarely be punished by officials, who are happy to ignore license requirements for a price. “We pay like this,” said Bir Bahadur Khadwada — the owner of the Kalika Guesthouse, frequented by migrant workers in the Gongabu area of Kathmandu — as he rubbed his thumb with his index finger under his dining table. “They go away.” Nepali experts note that bribery, lax law enforcement, and a lack of land-use controls left buildings vulnerable to seismic disasters.

Despite the numbers of crumbled buildings from the recent earthquake, some experts say they see signs of progress in building construction in Nepal. Kit Miyamoto, a structural engineer from California and a member of the state’s Seismic Safety Commission, traveled to Katmandu post-earthquake to help “red tag” dangerous structures around the city- including a residential tower that was badly damaged but did not collapse, avoiding mass mortality. Miyamoto told the New York Times that even as a “crude building site,” he saw a structural engineer’s holy grail — “ductile details” — shorthand for ways to secure parts of the steel-bar skeleton within concrete columns.

According to the Times, “one critical step involves short pieces of steel rod that are bent and secured around long vertical elements — holding them together like the metal bands wrapping a wooden barrel support the staves. Generations of experience shows that the ends of these encircling bars need to be bent back at least 135 degrees to stay locked together under stress.” “Ductile details are a sacred thing,” Miyamoto said. “It’s the last line of defense.”

Though Nepal has made some efforts to improve building codes, builders and contractors need to understand why simple steps that secure steel-bar skeletons within concrete columns can make a difference. “They have to know why that bend matters,” Miyamoto said. “A few extra seconds of effort can keep a building from falling on their kids.”

The United Nations Development Program office in Nepal has posted on YouTube, an online tutorial on simple, resilient building methods for both urban and rural structures. Yet even when the knowledge for safer building practices is available, implementation is key. “All the turmoil in the country has been such that there hasn’t been the political will at the municipal level to get the building consents and so on,” said Sharpe.

In Nepal, municipalities are responsible for issuing building permits, but only three out of fifty-eight municipalities have tried to incorporate the national building code into their permit process. Even those attempts have been “too limited and lack the necessary verification to ensure compliance,” saidNaresh Giri in a 2013 report for PreventionWeb, an information portal for the disaster reduction community.