By Maureen Fordham, March 2001 (Please click on the photographs for an enlarged version.)

Many reports suggest that the earthquake in the city of Ahmedabad hit the middle class rather than the poorer parts of society. Apartment blocks suffered damage as did various businesses. One report is of an apartment block which had a swimming pool installed on the roof, followed by a water tank to feed it. This excessive weight at the top of a building not designed to support it, produced a 'lollipop' effect during the earthquake and exacerbated the damage.

Searching through the rubble	Staircase failure	Banner expressing people's general satisfaction with the early responders (police, army etc) and extreme dissatisfaction with the government whom they regard as taking too long to act, and corrupt.	Remnants of a life scattered through the rubble
Two buildings, built 8 feet and 6 months apart. One collapses and one stands. Why? Speculation turns on a change in construction methods and materials.	Two identical buildings. One collapses and one stands. The only difference, according to local people, is that the former had a full water tank on its roof while the latter had an empty one.	The clock on the side of the building has stopped at the time of the earthquake - 8.46am.	A slightly closer view of the clock.
Cars crumpled like coke cans	A picture of earthquake resilience. Everywhere there are smiling faces but what pain lies behind the smiles? Occasionally the pain is revealed briefly but I am unsure how to interpret the behaviour of these children.	The work of clearing the rubble includes most of the family. Here workers break for tea and women feed their babies on site.	Women work with hand tools to clear the rubble
They carry small amounts of rubble in containers on their heads	while men work with machinery	Someone asks why they don't use machinery to shift the rubble more quickly. The answer is "then there would be no work for the women."	I am left wondering how this arrangement comes about. How is it negotiated? Formally? Informally? I suspect, cynically, that it is just a way of using cheap (female) labour but later I begin to think it is more organized than this. It is just one of many questions that need answering.

The District Collector later tells us that last July a cloudburst released 26 inches of rain in less than 6 hours. The rich, in their comfortable homes, were spared that time but the poor were hit badly. The emergency responders then had to reach four and a half lakh individuals (450,000). This earthquake mostly hit the rich, he says, not the poor. However, I can imagine that, even if this were the case, the rich are likely to recover better and more quickly with the resources at their disposal. There were 751 deaths and 136 were rescued from the debris (the last person to be rescued alive was after 12 hours). The Collector identified fear trauma as the major problem to deal with. The city didn't sleep indoors for 3 weeks for fear of falling buildings. This was made worse by the many aftershocks. 123 temporary shelters were set up so people could sleep there at night. Most night activities were affected but most daytime economic practices continued. How do you assure people that their buildings are safe? NGOs, social psychologists and doctors were organized to talk to people in the evenings. Meetings of 3-4,000 people were common. Trauma treatment is taking place in schools.

Not for the last time, we hear of the distinctive cultural context of this disaster. The Gujeratis are held to be a particularly entrepreneurial and organized people. Gujeratis have migrated around the world and they organized support and relief supplies from outside and within India (I am told by a waiter that the workers in our hotel in Delhi all voted to contribute a day's salary for this and any future such catastrophes. For a poorly paid waiter this is a significant contribution). Local people in Ahmedabad went out and found the heavy machinery needed to shift the rubble from the 88 collapsed buildings. The Collector promised to underwrite the costs: "go ahead and do what you have to do".

The Collector gives the following as conclusions and lessons learned:

Not a single building in Ahmedabad was ever constructed with prior soil testing.
There is no method of verifying or certifying structural drawings of any building. There is no peer review or vetting.
Engineering is not a profession in India. It must be made one. Professional bodies regulate other areas eg medicine but nothing regulates engineering activity.
There is good technical and IT education but no discipline in the engineering profession.
Structural engineers have 'gone to ground'.

Next page

Back to the top

Radix: the source or origin; the root
Quick look up at Dictionary.com