| |
Pakistan
Since the Pakistan earthquake on October 8, we have been in close contact with
colleagues in Pakistan (including Abid Shaban, a member of GHI's Advisory Board)
and here in the United States regarding ways in which GHI might take action to help
insure that the rebuilding of hard-hit areas is done in a way that will reduce losses
in future earthquakes. Arietta Chakos (a long-standing GHI supporter and Assistant
City Manager of the City of Berkeley) represented GHI at the November 13 meeting of
the Organization of Pakistani Entrepreneurs of North America in Washington D.C. and
described what we think needs to be done to help Pakistan. While awareness is still high,
we hope to initiate programs to build safe schools in Pakistan. Our decision to focus
on rebuilding schools rises from the assessment that 10,000 schools collapsed in this
earthquake. The Associated Press has reported that 8,000 schools collapsed in the Northwest
Frontier Province (NWFP) and 2,000 in Pakistan's less-populous Kashmir region. All of the
schools in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, collapsed. At least
17,000 children died in these school collapses. I have been invited to meet with Ministry
of Education officials in Karachi on December 6 to propose that Pakistan participates in
the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development program to improve earthquake safety
in schools (see below).
OECD Council Acts on School Earthquake Safety
In my last Newsletter, I reported on our ongoing work with the Program on Educational Building
of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). On July 21, 2005, the OECD's
governing council approved the OECD Recommendation Concerning Guidelines on Earthquake Safety in
Schools. Now, under a new OECD peer review process, governments will assist each other in formulating
and implementing policies for improved earthquake safety in schools and, most important, the OECD
Council will regularly review member countries' progress in implementing sound school earthquake safety programs.
To date, Mexico, Greece, Turkey, New Zealand, Canada, and Japan have expressed interest in joining the program.
Tom Tobin and I traveled in November to Turkey where we joined OECD's Hannah von Ahlefeld and Richard Yelland to plan
the pilot project in Turkey. We met with Mustafa Erdik (GHI Advisory Board Member and Chairman of the Department of
Earthquake Engineering at Bogaziçi University) in Istanbul and with Polat Gulkan (Professor at the Middle Eastern Technical University)
in Ankara to confer with them about how to conduct this project. Our meeting with officials at Turkey's Ministry of National
Education was encouraging, and we hope to receive official approval to start this project soon. While in Ankara, we also met
with the person in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who handles relations between Turkey and the Economic Cooperation Organization
(ECO), which is, essentially, a "sister" organization to the OECD, comprising Turkey and countries immediately to the east,
including Afghanistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan. We discussed the OECD school earthquake safety program and
explored the possibility of expanding the program to the ECO countries. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs official was supportive
of this idea and will try to organize a meeting in Istanbul of representatives of the ECO countries. We hope to inform them about the
OECD program and how we could help establish school earthquake safety programs in their countries.
At the Turkish Ministry of National Education I saw something very exciting. One of the big obstacles in achieving earthquake safety
in developing countries is the difficulty, especially in rural settings, for their governments to enforce building codes. This is in
large part due to the challenge of getting qualified inspectors to building sites on a regular basis. While visiting the Ministry of
National Education, I learned that they monitor the construction of new schools using video cameras (located on the construction sites)
that are connected to the Ministry by the internet. A person sitting in Ankara can control where the camera is pointed, and can zoom in on details.
Just the presence of the camera on the work site might reduce sloppy or corrupt practice. This is a technique that needs to be developed and
disseminated to other countries.
Page 2 |
