Aftermath of Gorkha–Nepal Earthquake 2015: Lessons Learnt

Abstract

Nepal is prone to various types of natural as well as human induced disasters such as: earthquakes, floods, landslides, fires, epidemics, avalanches, windstorms, hailstorms, lightning, glacier lake outburst floods, droughts and extreme weather events. Among all these disastersearthquake is the most scary and damaging. The effects of a disaster, whether natural or human induced, are often far reaching. In addition to the natural factors, the losses from disasters are increasing due to the human activities and absence of proactive legislations. Fundamentally, the weak structures have been found as the major cause of infrastructure collapse in earthquakes. This emphasizes the need for strict compliance of town planning bye-laws and earthquake resistant building codes. Thus, proactive disaster management legislation focusing on disaster preparedness is necessary. This paper analyses the critical gaps responsible for emphasizing the seismic risk and of factors that would contribute towards seismic risk reduction to enable various stakeholders to address the critical areas for improving seismic safety in Nepal and other earthquake prone countries. Additionally, this paper aims to pinpoint the deficiencies in disaster management system in Nepal with reference to the devastating earthquake of 25 April 2015 and suggest appropriate policy and advanced technical measures.

Statistics of the earthquakes in the central Himalaya and its vicinity in last 56 years, with an emphasis in the 25 April 2015 Gorkha, Nepal earthquake

“…In the earthquake history of Nepal two big earthquakes registered were 7.7 magnitude earthquake of 1833 that killed 414 people and 8.3 magnitude earthquake of 1934 that killed 8519 people (Joshi and Kaushik, 2017). The comparatively much smaller earthquakes that visited the nation were 1980 earthquake of 6.5 magnitude in western part of Nepal that killed 103 people, and 1988 earthquake of magnitude 6.5 in eastern part of Nepal that killed 721 people (Chhetri, 2018;Miyake et al, 2017). The most destructive earthquakes of 1934, 1980, 1988 caused heavy fatalities and destruction of physical properties.…”