|
FLEEING TO HIGH GROUND: Beichuan residents climbed up the mountains to safety on Tuesday as they abandoned their homes. -- PHOTO: REUTERS
|
|
|
NEW YORK - THE enormous loss of life in collapsed schools around quake-stricken Sichuan province could have been significantly reduced by using known methods for designing or retrofitting structures in earthquake zones, according to several experts on global hazards.
But China is just one of many countries with known earthquake vulnerability that has been slow to transform schools - a keystone of any community - from potential death traps into havens, the experts and some community campaigners for school safety said.
Hundreds of students are thought to have perished in schools during the earthquake which has killed close to 15,000 so far.
Experts on earthquake dangers have warned for years that tens of millions of students in thousands of schools, from Asia to the Americas, face similar risks. Yet, programmes to reinforce existing schools or require that new ones be built to extra-sturdy standards are inconsistent, slow and inadequately financed.
While earthquakes can sometimes exact a far wider toll on other public buildings, school collapses are particularly wrenching, development officials and experts say, because students are often what propel a struggling nation from poverty to prosperity.
In 2004, the 30-nation Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development released a study which concluded that schools 'routinely' collapsed in earthquakes around the world because of avoidable design or construction errors or because existing laws and building codes were not enforced.
'Unless action is taken immediately to address this problem, much greater loss of life and property will occur,' the report says.
The risks are growing, experts say, as populations in poor regions continue to rise and the world - rich and poor - shifts ever more towards urban centres, many with well-charted seismic threats.
In recent years, there have been deadly school collapses after earthquakes in Italy, Algeria, Morocco and Turkey.
Most notably, in Pakistan on Oct 8, 2005, at least 17,000 children died as more than 7,000 schools collapsed after a powerful jolt shook a mountainous region near the Indian border.
Delays in addressing such threats sometimes result less from financing and engineering than from societal inertia, given competing problems and the unpredictable nature of earthquakes, said Dr Ben Wisner, a former geography professor at California State University and a founder of the Coalition for Global School Safety.
Often, money and technology are not the issue, he said, so much as access to basic information about risks and simple ways to bolster buildings.
'On the whole, the cost of designing and building a school, say, a three-storey junior high school in Mexico City, is only about 5 per cent higher,' he said.
'You don't necessarily design a building to avoid collapse but design so that it's a survivable collapse. You want large voids so they can be accessed by rescuers.'
NEW YORK TIMES
|
