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Himalayas are a dormant quake zone

Asha Devi, a 90-year-old resident of Parsauni village near the border town of Birgunj, in Nepal, clearly remembers the terror of 1934.

That was the year when the 'big one' struck Nepal. The earthquake destroyed a large part of central Nepal and the bordering Indian state of Bihar to the south.

''The houses shook violently,'' says Asha Devi who remembers many details. ''There were no deaths in my village. But we heard that Kathmandu had been totally destroyed. The ground shook so hard that people were knocked off their feet.''

Recent re-interpretation of data by seismologists show that the 'Bihar-Nepal earthquake', as the quake is technically known, measured 8.4 on the Richter scale and that its epicentre was located near Bhojpur in Nepal's eastern hills.

Houses and structures tumbled and became rubble. Thousands died in both Nepal and northern India and many uncounted thousands were left wounded and homeless. Yet 64 years later, the dangers posed by earthquakes seem to have been forgotten by today's generation.

Specialists who study and analyse tectonic plate shifts and have pored over every detail of the 1934 earthquake warn the Himalayas are prone to such killer earthquakes and there are sure to be more in the future.

''Studies show that in the nineteenth century alone, there were four major earthquakes in the Himalayas comparable in magnitude to the '34 quake,'' says Amod Dixit, a geologist and general secretary of National Society for Earthquake Technology -- Nepal. ''So far this century, only one has been recorded. But one never knows when the other big one will hit.''

Experts are particularly worried that if a big one were to strike now or in the near future, the damage would be many times more than that caused by the 1934 earthquake. ''There's been a population boom in the intervening years,'' says Mahesh Nakarmi, an engineer and project manager at the Kathmandu Valley Earthquake Risk Management Project.

''Haphazard urbanisation of cities and towns has led to the sprouting of dense and unsafe concrete jungles which could come crashing down in a 7-8 magnitude quake,'' says Nakarmi.

The Kathmandu valley's population today has grown to 1.2 million from a mere 300,000 in 1934 when the quake killed 1.5 percent of the population. That would be a staggering 18,000 people today, and hospital and emergency services will be unable to cope with the scale of the disaster.

''Practically none of the buildings in Kathmandu and across Nepal, except for the International Convention Centre, are designed to minimise earthquake risks,'' says Professor Li Tianchi, a geologist and academic who works at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development.

Geologists know the Himalayas were formed 60 to 70 million years ago when the Indian continental plate separated from the ancient landmass of Gondwanaland, drifted northwards and collided with Asia.

The ''subduction'' (sinking beneath) of the hard rock layers of the Indian plate into the relatively softer sedimentary formations of the Tibetan plateau is still continuing at the rate of two to four centimetres annually.

The result is, new fault lines are being created beneath the Himalayas, while the old faults like the ones that triggered the 1934 earthquake are still active. Three major fault lines beneath the Himalayas have been identified.

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