Lessons in disaster: children taught to prepare for Bangladesh’s killer quakes

In an attempt to avoid large-scale casualties during earthquakes, Dipecho – the disaster preparedness programme of the EU’s humanitarian aid and civil protection operations – has devised a training programme on how to deal with disaster in primary and secondary schools in Bangladesh.

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This article titled “Lessons in disaster: children taught to prepare for Bangladesh’s killer quakes” was written by Saad Hammadi in Savar, for theguardian.com on Wednesday 24th August 2016 04.00 UTC

As soon as the school bell rang, Lucky Akhter, 15, dropped down on her knees and took cover under a bench. When a second bell rang, she and 30 other students walked out of the classroom, joining a queue of about 300 students covering their heads with books and bags.

The students at Yearpur high school in Savar, north-west of Dhaka, were practising an earthquake drill prompted by the increasing frequency of tremors in Bangladesh over the past four years.

“The drills are important so we can save ourselves during a real incident,” says Lucky.

Bangladesh, India and Myanmar are vulnerable to a mega-thrust earthquake – a powerful 9.0 magnitude quake, according to research published in Nature Geoscience.

“Tremors have been taking place at least once every year for the last three years. This year we have felt it twice,” says Dewan Mohammed Abdus Sattar, principal of the school.

Once, a tremor occurred during school hours, causing students to panic and run straight out of the classroom, he remembers. “Things have changed since then,” he says.

In an attempt to avoid large-scale casualties during earthquakes, Dipecho – the disaster preparedness programme of the EU’s humanitarian aid and civil protection operations – has devised a training programme on how to deal with disaster in primary and secondary schools in Bangladesh. Save the Children has been working with the government to implement the training since May 2015.

The move follows major earthquakes that have killed thousands of young people globally when school buildings have been damaged or destroyed.

In 2005, an earthquake in the Pakistani-administered part of Kashmir (pdf) killed 19,000 children, mostly due to widespread collapse of school buildings. Three years later, two earthquakes, of 9.0 and 6.1 magnitude, hit Sichuan, China (pdf), killing more than 5,000 students as thousands of classrooms collapsed.

So far, Bangladeshi authorities have completed drills in 84 primary schools and nine secondary schools. The government is finalising drill guidelines to enable the programme to be rolled out across the country’s nearly 66,000 primary schools and 32,000 secondary schools.

Bangladesh is at the junction of three tectonic plates that stretch across India and Myanmar. Seismologists have identified an active friction of the earth’s plates between Chittagong and the Sylhet region, says Syed Humayun Akhter, professor of geology and seismology at the University of Dhaka and an author of the Nature Geoscience report.

The Indian plate moving in the north-east direction has been stuck against the Myanmar sub-plate moving in a south-westerly direction for at least 400 years, he says. “The condition is now such that a slip could happen by at least six metres.” This “slip” could affect an area of 250 square kilometres.

India began a national school safety programme in 2011 and has expanded it to include drills and evacuation procedures for hospitals and in local neighbourhoods. Some states, including Gujarat, have started auditing the structural soundness of government school buildings, says Vinod Chandra Menon, a founder member of India’s National Disaster Management Authority.

“Our school buildings are very fragile. When an earthquake happens, the aftershocks can be very risky and hundreds of aftershocks [can] happen. If students are sitting inside the classroom, it might be risky for them because there might be cracks that can pose a high risk,” says Menon.

Dipecho funding focuses on improving the resilience of people, rather than buildings.

After the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh in 2013, engineers audited more than 3,500 factories (pdf) to see how structurally sound they were. They said 25% of the buildings needed to be improved. “We need to do the same for residential buildings,” says Professor Mehedi Ansary of the civil engineering department of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.

Many cities in India, Myanmar and Bangladesh have grown without sound urban planning, says Akhter.

In Myanmar, Plan International has worked with the ministry of education to revise and develop policies on safe schools, says Olle Castell, disaster risk manager of Plan International Asia. “This … will have a great impact, as a new generation of children will have awareness about risks and protective measures,” he says, adding that the country is starting to embrace assistance from civil society organisations after democratic reform.

In Bangladesh, the government is hiring an international consultant to provide training on earthquake preparedness for local residential areas, which would begin in September, says Reaz Ahmed, director general of the department of disaster management.

As the drills continue, many schools need to do more to save the lives of their students. “In many schools the chairs are too low in height for students to seek shelter,” says Monir Uddin, manager of school disaster management at Save the Children in Bangladesh. The evacuation process at Yearpur high school was completed within three minutes but many schools in urban areas hardly have enough space to provide a safe location.

At Yearpur, Sattar says he plans to hold regular drill training. “We have become more organised than any other time,” he says. “We will have to organise this once every three months. The students can use these lessons in case of a real situation.”

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