GUWAHATI, Jan 21 - Noted earthquake engineering expert Dr Sarada Sarma of the Imperial College, London has laid stress on studying the history of earthquakes for designing earthquake-resistant structures in the earthquake-vulnerable areas.
His attention was drawn to the reports of damage caused by the earthquakes in Italy recently. It is generally believed that the structures in the western countries are more earthquake resistant. But some structures in Central Italy collapsed under the impact of the series of earthquakes that rocked the nation in October last year, particularly the one that occurred on October 30, 2016 with a magnitude of 6.6 on the Richter scale.
Under the impact of this earthquake, heavy damages occurred to some of the structures as well as to the village of Arquata del Tronto and the Bacilica of Saint Bendict in Norcia.
Pointing to the fact that the North-east region has experienced bigger earthquakes and even the Delhi region of the nation has experienced earthquakes of bigger magnitude without any report of damage to their heavy and old structures like the Rang Ghar, the Talatal Ghar, the Qutab Minar, the Taj Mahal etc., Dr Sarma was asked to explain the factors behind all such �weirdness.�
Explaining, Dr Sarma, who was on a short visit to the city, told this correspondent that the Italy structures damaged by the above earthquakes were pre-engineered, old ones and hence they failed to withstand the impacts of the above earthquakes, while the modern engineered structures of this European nation did withstand the earthquakes.
However, he said the pre-engineered Indian structures, like the Qutub Minar surviving many earthquakes, might be because of their structures being designed and built out of experience.
But if the epicentres of the earthquakes were located under such structures, they might not have survived the jolts or impacts of the earthquakes, said Dr Sarma.
He, therefore, underlined the need of studying the history of the earthquakes.
He also informed that at present, studies are undertaken on the movements of micro-tectonic plates, to understand earthquakes in more details.