CHALLENGES AHEAD -“We have never experienced anything like this in Darjeeling before

“We have never experienced anything like this in Darjeeling before…” the voice at the end of the line said to me. “The ground just shook and shook and would not stop shaking and we were simply terrified.”

The jolt at Richter 6.8 that shook much of the Indo-Gangetic plain and the eastern Himalaya on the evening of September 18 was grim. But it could well have been stronger, lasted longer, caused great tormenting miseries. For seismicity is awake in the region and ‘the mother of all earthquakes’ is gestating an offspring for which we are unprepared.

To alarm and to get alarmed is wrong. And it does not help.

To alert and to be alert can never be. And it always pays.

We, as a people, a society and a techno-political system are not half as alert as we should be to the seismic challenge caused by India’s unsleeping push into Asia. That is one of the most real, tactile, devastating challenges ahead of us. We can do nothing to prevent it. But we can do something to minimize its impact.

To return to Darjeeling.

The famous ‘Bihar earthquake’ of 1934 had its epicentre not in Bihar itself but near where the September 18 epicentre in Sikkim lay. It was of magnitude 8.4. As many as 30,000 people perished in it. Darjeeling was badly hit. The Governor’s House in Darjeeling was among those structures that were irretrievably damaged. It had to be pulled down and a new structure, the present Raj Bhavan, was constructed on the site, the then governor, John Anderson, personally supervising the work. Like every hill town in India, Darjeeling has over the years had high-rise buildings coming up. Today, these overlook some of its most congested localities. It also has a giant water-tank in the middle of the town. An assessment needs to be made of the danger these giantisms pose to themselves and to others around them in an earthquake situation.

Today, if we are to be hit by anything around, not to say above, Richter 7, the results would be too terrible to contemplate. With buildings having come up as they have, the thickening of arterial roads being what it is, and congestion being the name of the urban game, post-quake rescue and relief operations in our towns and cities, especially those in the hills, would take superhuman effort.

But anticipating the contingency and planning for cushioning its impact do not require superhuman effort. They require cool and commonsensical thinking ahead of the crisis. De-populating and even demolishing vulnerable structures, having in readiness plans for landing helicopters and light-wing aircraft even at night-time and in adverse conditions like winter rains and fog, requisitioning public spaces for shelter, equipping hospitals and dispensaries in risk-zones for trauma care, and above all, raising public awareness of earthquake risk, are things that cannot be avoided.

Of these tasks, the last and most important, namely, raising public awareness, has been done for us, albeit unwittingly, by the earthquake of September 18.

The ground having shaken and shaken as never before, the people of the region now know exactly what to expect, what to face with calm preparedness. It is up to the administrations of the areas concerned now to utilize the prevailing sensitization and, taking time by the forelock, act betimes.

The National Disaster Management Authority has been functioning in the area of seismic disasters with speed and alacrity. But administrations across the country, confronted with many scorchingly ‘real’ problems at hand, find it difficult to concentrate on what seems like a hypothetical problem. And yet, a Richter 7 or 8 is not theory ; it lies just underfoot.

Earthquakes have a great ally — public forgetfulness. Few remember the facts of even recent earthquakes in our country. The 1993 Latur earthquake at magnitude 7.4 killed 20,000, the 2001 in Kutch at magnitude 7.7 also killed 20,000, the Indian Ocean tsunami (8+, December 26, 2004) that shook the whole planet from Indonesia to Africa, and Indonesia to Alaska, killed numbers and annihilated settlements beyond belief. Geopolitics being more compelling a subject than geography, few in India remember that the brutal one of Moment Magnitude 7.5 on October 8, 2005 left 79,000 officially dead in Pakistan occupied Kashmir and 1,500 in Jammu and Kashmir. These are statistics from a yesterday that does not seem to belong to us. They are also indicators of a tomorrow that we are going to have to deal with.

After being concurrently accredited to our diplomatic mission in Iceland (2003-4), duty required me to convey my first impressions to the then president, Abdul Kalam. I told him of Iceland’s geothermal reserves and volcanic landscape. He came straight to the point. “Please ask if Iceland has done any new work on earthquake-prediction.” This was of course, for me, a mandate and an order. “The earth is like the human brain,” an Icelandic scientist explained to me. “Prior to a stroke, mini-strokes are known to occur. They generally go unnoticed for they are very, very minor. We try to find out through sensors how many mini-quakes have occurred and within what frequency and where and then, from the data pattern of mini-quake densities and intensities, we are able to conclude if a quake is on its way, like a major stroke …”

India and Iceland have, since, collaborated in the matter of earthquake anticipation. Sensors have been put into the ground at some sites, including our Northeast. We owe it to ourselves to know if these installations forewarned us about any increased activity prior to the September 18 experience.

We have lost time. We can lose no more. We must attempt the following:

1. An urgent and officially issued seismic zonation of India, either confirming or updating the existing four zones,which is as much in the public domain and in the people’s consciousness as the boundaries of our states and Union territories. This zonation should remind us of the areas of very high risk, high risk, low risk and little risk. This should appear in geography text books in schools and be part of the documentation used by all local bodies within their jurisdictions. Land records are public property and public knowledge. The proven risk of earthquakes to the very physical integrity of land should likewise be made part of land use management, protection and policy. The public knows the market values of land, it knows the high-end from the low-end rates, depending on the land’s pluses and minuses. Why should it not know what the seismic values of those lands are, what the MSK (Medvedev-Sponheuer-Karnik) seismic intensities are and how they apply to the sites they live in?

2. The setting up of a seismological agency, independent of the meteorological department which keeps us informed of seismicities as regularly as the met office does about the weather. And, even more pertinently, keeps the various administrative stakeholders informed, alerted, advised.

3. The drawing up of a plan for the East and the Northeast, in which rescue and relief operations can be conducted by air, land and on water, in the foulest of weather conditions and the most elusive of terrain conditions. And the training and equipping of personnel specially earmarked for earthquake duty like, for instance, the fire services.

4. The calibration of structures as being at very high risk, high risk and low risk so that their residents can be forewarned and also made responsible to protect themselves and those in the vicinity by securing the concerned buildings against seismic risk. Likewise, the inauguration of a new architecture regime to assist the phased replacement of the vulnerable buildings. Public buildings have to come under priority scrutiny for their seismic-safety. No collaboration with Japan can be as germane to our needs as an Indo-Japanese plan for earthquake-efficient architecture.

5. The minimizing of the impact of a ‘seismic- stroke’ which cannot be prevented but, by conjoint planning and action in good time, have its blow softened.

Terror and seismic action come without warning and disappear without trace, leaving innocents dead and dying in the debris they create. We cannot allow them to demolish our collective equipoise, but we cannot afford to remain unvigilant, unprepared and uneducated about their propensities.