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On October 8, 2005, just before 9:00 a.m. local time, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake occurred
near the Pakistan town of Muzaffarabad. Violent shaking leveled entire villages and
triggered landslides, cutting off access to remote areas in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier
Province and in the Kashmir region. It was the deadliest earthquake in the recent history
of the sub-continent, killing more than 73,000 people, injuring more than 128,000, and
leaving millions homeless. Because the earthquake struck during school hours, fatalities
among schoolchildren were particularly high. At least 17,000 children died in schools,
and thousands more were seriously injured.
To help Pakistan in its efforts to prevent such devastating losses in future earthquakes,
GeoHazards International (GHI) has begun a three-year project "Building Pakistan's Capacity
for Instruction, Research, and Practice in Earthquake Engineering and Retrofit."
Partnering with NED University of Engineering and Technology in Karachi (www.neduet.edu.pk)
and other institutions in Pakistan that train future engineers and architects, GHI is working
to strengthen the curricula for both practicing engineers and students. This pioneering
collaborative project is funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID)
through The National Academies and by the Pakistan Higher Education Commission.
The project concentrates on building capacity in Pakistan's academic, public, and private
sectors to assess and reduce the seismic vulnerability of existing buildings, and construct
new buildings better. To accomplish these goals, GHI and NED have paired a team of American
experts in earthquake engineering education and practice with a team of Pakistani professors
and building professionals. The project team is comprised of Dr. Sarosh Lodi and Dr. Sahibzad
a Rafeeqi of NED on the Pakistan side and, on the US side, of Dr. Janise Rodgers, Mr. Thomas
Tobin and Dr. Brian Tucker (all of GHI), Dr. Gregory Deierlein (Stanford University), Mr.
David Mar (Tipping-Mar + associates), and Dr. Khalid Mosalam (University of California, Berkeley).
The project also includes numerous other participants in academia and industry from both Pakistan
and the United States.
Together, the teams are improving the earthquake engineering curriculum, developing
training materials and hosting professional training workshops for Pakistani engineers,
architects, and other building professionals. They are training a cadre of NED Engineering
University professors to teach assessment and retrofit methods, integrating formal instruction
in theory with practice by using case studies of existing buildings typical of the local building
stock.
While building earthquake engineering education capacity in Pakistan, the project is at
the same time strengthening cooperative research and professional relationships between
Pakistani and American researchers through academic exchange, consultation on research
topics that directly impact seismic safety in Pakistan, and creation of an earthquake
engineering research agenda for Pakistan. In the coming months of the collaborative
project, we will post updates of project activities and progress.
For more information on progress to date, see http://peer.berkeley.edu/pdf/Khalid-pakistan-final2.pdf
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