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IIT Ropar professor carried siesmic zonation for disaster mitigation purpose

August 27, 2018 12:35 PM

Punjab News Express
ROPAR: India has been facing threats from earthquakes since ancient times. Past major devastating earthquakes inflicted heavy casualties and economic damage to the country and the neighbouring areas.

One way to mitigate the destructive impact of the earthquakes is to conduct a seismic hazard analysis and take mitigation measures.Major earthquakes in the last 20 years such as Chamoli (29th March 1999); Latur, 30th Sep 1993; Jabalpur, 22nd May 1997; Bhuj, 26th Jan 2001 have highlighted the need of seismic zonation for the Indian sub-continent. Earthquakes do not pose great danger to mankind direcly as public cannot be shaken to death by an earthquake. The casualities due to earthquake happen because of associated hazards and infrastructure failures.

As earthquake engineering involves identification, evaluation and mitigation of seismic hazards, Dr. Naveen James, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, IIT Ropar, Dr. T. G. Sitharam, Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru  and Dr. Sreevalsa Kolathayar, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu brings a book titled “Comprehensive Seismic Zonation Schemes forRegions at Different Scales” which delineates seismic zonation methodologies in detail in reference with Indian context. The book very well highlights the influence of the site characteristics such as local geology and geotechnical properties of overburden soil strata on earthquake shaking at that location. The book presents a detailed and comprehensive review on the feasibility of various methodologies for site characterization and site effect estimation to carry out seismic zonation for regions at different levels namely micro, meso and macro-level. Further, the book also recommends appropriate methodologies for site characterization and site effect estimation to be adopted for micro, meso and macro-level of seismic zonation. The book as presents the case study of micro and macro-level seismic zonations. The micro-level zonation was carried out for the carried out for the nuclear power plant site, and macro-level zonation was performed for the state of Karnataka.

Divulging more, Dr. Naveen James said, “Urbanization of cities is growing and expanding due to increasing migration of people in cities. Thus, it is necessary to assess the risk due to earthquakes and other natural disasters so that casualties to human lives and damages to infrastructures can be minimized. Seismic Zonation is a first step towards the mitigation of the destructive impact of an earthquake. While designing new structures/buildings or  retrofitting existing ones, engineers can use the seismic microzonation maps to understand the level of earthquake hazard at the site. For practicing engineers and most importantly for policy makers, this book will serve as a roadmap.”

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