![]() Keeping students and teachers safe during earthquakes, and ensuring that education is minimally disrupted after seismic events, are simple goals with complex solutions. “The most severe effect of an earthquake is obviously when children and teachers are injured or killed, but even if they aren’t in school when an earthquake happens, education is disrupted if the school building is damaged.” “Education is a key component of a functional society,” says Janise Rodgers, chief operating officer of GeoHazards International, a nonprofit organization that helps vulnerable communities prepare for earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides and climate hazards. In 2005, for example, when a magnitude-7.6 earthquake struck northern Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, more than 19,000 children were killed, most in collapsing school buildings.ĭamage to school buildings can also have other long-term repercussions for communities. Had those damaged classrooms been filled with students and teachers, the death toll would have been far higher.Įarthquakes can and do occur when students and teachers are in school buildings. ![]() Still, more than 500 students and teachers died in collapsing school buildings, according to data from the Nepal Ministry of Education. The quake - in which nearly 9,000 people died and 22,000 others were injured - struck on a Saturday, when schools in Nepal are not in session. When the magnitude-7.8 Gorkha earthquake rocked Nepal on April 25, 2015, it destroyed 19,000 classrooms and damaged more than 30,000 others. Credit: both: Anne Sanquini, GeoHazards International. No students were present because the quake occurred on a Saturday. Blue metal schooldesks can be seen crushed between the pancaked floors. McCloskey and Sieh now plan to work together to assess the risks of a rupture on faults south of the recent epicentres.This school in Nepal collapsed during the 2015 magnitude-7.8 Gorkha earthquake. In a 17 March paper in Nature, John McCloskey of the University of Ulster used models of how stress can move down faults to identify areas that could be at risk of rupture following the December earthquake (J. More positive results will probably come from mixing the geological observations with physical modelling of how earthquakes affect the surrounding region. Some scientists say that failure to see anything here would be another nail in the coffin for these efforts. Such land ‘deformations’ were not seen in the run-up to other well-monitored large earthquakes, such as Tokachi-Oki in northern Japan in 2003. ![]() Sieh's data, taken continuously at various locations on the islands near the earthquake fault, should help to resolve a controversy over whether changes in Earth's structure can be seen before an earthquake. ![]() He hopes to study how the land moved before, during and after the 28 March event and the one last December that generated a tsunami.ĭata coming in as Nature went to press showed some surprisingly large movements after the March earthquake, such as land at an airport on the nearby island of Simeulue, which rose 1.6 metres and shifted 2.3 metres towards the ruptured fault, says Sieh. Kerry Sieh, for example, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is pulling together data from global positioning system receivers on and around Sumatra. Researchers are hoping that data collected in the wake of the recent earthquakes in Indonesia will allow them to build better models of the relationship between different seismic events in the region. ![]()
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