The potential for a modest school to survive a powerful earthquake is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in Balakot, Pakistan, one of hundreds of communities near the border with India shattered by a tectonic jolt on October 8, 2005. About 80,000 people died in all, including 17,000 children in more than 7,000 schools that collapsed. Balakot, draped on a rugged hilltop, became a field of rubble. Out of several school buildings, the only one that remained standing was the one that had been reinforced two years earlier with a couple of extra columns and roof beams.Garry de la Pomerai, a British rescue expert who spent days seeking survivors amid wreckage in the region in the days after the quake, said he marvelled at the surviving schoolhouse when he returned to tour the town on May 15, just three days after another devastating quake in a different part of the world left hundreds of children and staff members crushed in their classrooms.De la Pomerai was attending an international conference on school safety in Islamabad even as armies of rescuers were clawing at the remains of collapsed schools in China’s Sichuan province. “I’m sick to death of going to schools where there are no survivors,” de la Pomerai, 49, said in a telephone interview from the safety conference. “That’s the very future of a community.” After the Pakistan quake, he joined an international coalition of engineers, safety and community activists, earthquake experts and disaster agency officials trying to transform schools from death traps into havens.The movement really began in California in 1933, when 70 schools collapsed around Los Angeles in the so-called Long Beach In Balakot, new, sturdier school buildings—built with the help of a Swiss development agency—stand near the repaired surviving structure. But also nearby are the small graves of some of the children killed in 2005. Despite progress in California and a few other places, including Bogota, Colombia, vulnerability prevails around the world’s seismic hot spots, from the Pacific Northwest to the Philippines. In India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, a massive existing school-construction programme —producing about 30 new schools each day over the last several years—has begun to incorporate earthquake-resistant features and training for 10,000 masons and more than 1,100 junior engineers. But 125,000 existing schools remain “unsafe and in need of retrofit,” according to a 2007 report from the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center.The persistent vulnerability is not limited to remote regions of developing countries, but extends to the city centres of places as cosmopolitan as Portland, Oregon, and Istanbul, Turkey, both of which face looming seismic shocks. Yumei Wang, the director of Oregon’s geohazards team, said a quick evaluation last year found that 1,300 of the state’s schools (housing 340,000 students) and emergency-services buildings had a “high or very high” risk of collapse in a substantial earthquake. Retrofitting is advancing far faster in schools serving wealthier areas than those in poor ones, frustrating many earthquake experts. That pattern was revealed in some Chinese cities. But it exists in Oregon as well. “The poor districts don’t even know about this risk because they are struggling with everything else,” Wang said. “It’s ugly to talk about, but there’s this disparity. The rich school districts are getting better education, better textbooks, better sports — and safer schools.”The main challenge in bolstering resilience to such geophysical shocks, experts said, is not the structural engineering. There is no mystery to adding and securing iron rods in concrete, securing floors to beams, boosting the resilience of columns, monitoring the size of gravel mixed with cement. It is not cost, either. In California, Tucker notes, the premium for building earthquake resistance into new schools is less than 4 percent. The payoff, beyond saved lives, is significantly lower repair costs after a temblor — 10 to 100 times less than in unimproved buildings. (In poorer countries, the differential in cost could be substantially higher, but the payoff, experts say, is priceless.)The biggest challenge of all may simply be redefining security, and building societies that demand government investments match risks, said Fouad Bendimerad, an engineering and risk-management consultant in California. “The typical government spends around 15 percent of its GDP to defend against exterior military threats that may never occur,” Bendimerad said. “Why do we want to exonerate governments from dedicating a small portion of that 15 percent to protect against the threats of natural hazards that we know will happen?”-ANDREW C. REVKIN (New York Times)
