Uttarakhand: IIT Kharagpur To Develop Maps For Roorkee Identifying High Risk Areas For Earthquake-Damage

Scholars at IIT-Kharagpur are developing detailed city-level maps for Roorkee, Uttarakhand, that can help identify areas expected to have the most damaging impact of an earthquake, reports The Tribune.

The research would reportedly help government officials to quickly identify areas with high hazard risk and send in rescue and relief teams without losing precious time, manually surveying the affected region when a disaster strikes.

“Saving time during a disaster is important, because time is life,” Prof Sankar Kumar Nath from IIT-Kharagpur, West Bengal, was quoted in the report as saying.

Seismic micro-zoning, as the method is known, is a technique of dividing potential earthquake area into different zones based on factors such as tectonics of plate, quality of soil, topography, type of buildings etc. to understand which areas within a city may get most impacted by an earthquake.

The technique would also take into account other secondary hazards such as the landslides or floods that may be caused due to the quakes.

Nath presented his proposal at the sixteenth Symposium on Earthquake Engineering organised at IIT-Roorkee, Uttarakhand, in collaboration with the Indian Society of Earthquake Technology.