The FOCUS approach to Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) in Pakistan

Text by: Naveed Khan Photography: Courtesy Focus

The skyscrapers in Tokyo swayed, as the island nation of Japan was hit by the M 9.0 tremor on March 11, 2011. The earthquake is believed to be the strongest of our recorded history. The earthquake produced a 23 feet high Tsunami in the Pacific Ocean, which ran onto the coastal land of Japan, annihilating human settlements. The calamitous natural phenomena killed around 20,000 people in Japan and thousands more are still missing. Observations and calculations by UK, Japan and Austria based scientific research organizations suggest that the quake was so massive that it may have moved our planet from its axis by some centimeters, reducing the length of days forever.

If we look at the M 7.8 disaster that hit parts of Pakistan, India and Afghanistan, on October 8, 2005, it is shocking to see that at least 87,000 people were killed and around 100,000 injured in the disaster. Millions of people were also displaced from their houses and villages, creating the biggest humanitarian crisis in the country’s history, dwarfed in magnitude later only by the 2010 flood disaster.

One cannot resist the impulsive thought of comparing the number of people killed during the mega earthquake in Japan with the one in Kashmir. It seems that had the 23 feet high earth-quake triggered Tsunami not hit coastal areas of Japan, the number of deaths may have been way lesser than what they are!

What was different in Japan that resulted in relatively lesser loss of life due to the collapse of buildings?

One of the vital differences between the two countries is that while Japan strictly follows disaster resilient building codes, in Pakistan most of the construction in village, towns and cities, alike, is being done without any planning, mostly using sub-standard materials, and flawed designs. So, as the buildings came down in Pakistan like houses-of-cards after the M 7.8 tremor, in Japan they swayed, and some may have collapsed, under impact of the M 9.0 mega quake.

In an essay titled “The Kashmir Earthquake: a Confluence of Unfortunate Events”, Neil Edelman states that 50 % of the houses in the Pakistan administered Kashmir region collapsed due to impact of the disaster, while 25 % of the shops were also leveled to the ground. Neil further reports that 291 hospitals and 12 000 schools were destroyed, resulting in the death of at least 17,000 children, an entire “generation of children”.