NEW DELHI, 13 October 2005— South Asia’s devastating earthquake put fear among residents in new high-rise apartments in New Delhi but the city’s patchwork of illegal homes are the real worry, experts say.
Newspapers and television networks reported how thousands of residents of apartment blocks around New Delhi panicked after an earthquake that measured 7.6 on the Richter scale swayed the multi-story buildings Saturday.
But Subir Saha, director of New Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture, said the real danger to the Indian capital lay in sprawling patchwork brick and mortar homes stacked almost back-to-back across the capital.
“Every alternate year, an earthquake of moderate intensity strikes New Delhi as it lies in a high seismic zone. However it is not multi-storied buildings but masses of unauthorized colonies that are a real worry,” he said.
He said a strong jolt could topple thousands of buildings.
“Unauthorized construction is rampant in the city. If one structure is affected, then it can easily fall down on an adjacent one and trigger a wave of collapsed structures,” Saha added.
Nearly a third of the 14 million residents of New Delhi live in slum colonies, another one-third live in housing colonies that are deemed illegal by city authorities, and the rest are in homes classified as developed areas.
B.M. Ahuja, whose firm Ahuja Consultants is one among four surveying the earthquake resistance of key buildings in the capital, agreed that illegal colonies were the most vulnerable.
“If an earthquake of high magnitude strikes here, everything goes,” he said. “Roads will not be passable because of collapsed buildings. Most of the hospitals will be gone. Police stations will be gone.”
Saha said almost none of the houses in any of the areas had invested in quake-proofing, but the problem was particularly bad in the crowded slums.
“Where do they have the money for thinking about earthquake prevention? They hardly have enough to feed themselves two square meals a day,” he said.
Officials say that tens of thousands of people died in Pakistan in the earthquake, including dozens of residents of a high-rise apartment block in Islamabad.
But most of the deaths came in remote areas with little infrastructure and haphazard construction techniques.
Thousands of homes were destroyed in remote mountain villages of India’s Kashmir region where at least 1,300 people died, leading to concern that crowded New Delhi could suffer far worse damage in a major quake.
Delhi lies in what is known as Zone IV of seismic activity, which means it is susceptible to earthquakes of 6.0 to 6.5 on the Richter scale.
The capital has escaped devastation in its recent past, and officials now require new multi-story buildings to be able to withstand 8.0-magnitude quakes.
“There is a probability of an earthquake of 6 to 6.5 magnitude occurring in Delhi. Whether that will happen in 10 years or 100 years, we don’t know,” A.K. Shukla, director of the Earthquake Risk Evaluation Center, was quoted by the Times of India as saying.
