The disaster Saturday's quake portends

The earthquake that jolted the country for over half a minute on Saturday morning, December 2, did cause panic among the people at different places in the country, though no death or major damage to property was reported.
In Cumilla, an administrative district 100 kilometres to the South of capital Dhaka, 76 workers of a garment factory were reportedly injured in a stampede as workers rushing to the exit door found it locked. So, it is a sheer stroke of luck that a worse disaster did not happen. As could be learnt from some workers of that garment factory, the level of preparedness against earthquake was poor there. Neither had the workers regularly practised necessary earthquake drills. So, it is not hard to understand, why the workers panicked in the first place.
It is also not the first case of factory workers in the face of disasters like earthquake or fire have been denied immediate exit. Why the passages to the exit door of factories are often so narrow and why are the doors kept shut, particularly during a disaster, is beyond comprehension. This is inhumane and criminal and appropriate authorities need to look into it and put an end to this barbaric culture once and for all. More importantly, preparedness against natural disasters through regular orientation sessions and conducting of drills should be made mandatory at every place where a large number of people work, live or gather.
Many think, since earthquake-like calamities occur rarely, so there's no need to take the issue of preparedness seriously. But earthquake experts have a different view of the matter. Soon after the Saturday's temblor of 5.6 magnitude and the epicentre of which was at Ramganj upazila under Lakshmipur district lying about 120 kilometres to the southeast of Dhaka, some experts' views were carried by the national media. What they said is blood-chilling. The epicentre of the quake was in a subduction zone stretching from the north-eastern district of Sylhet to coastal, south-eastern district of Cox's Bazar. A subduction zone, according to the US's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is a stretch where two of the earth's tectonic plates collide. In that case, one of the plates sinks, or subducts, beneath the other. Such tectonic activities can cause most destructive earthquakes on the planet. Notably, tectonic plates are gigantic slabs of rock that divide the earth's crust and are constantly on the move to reshape the earth's landscape. Since Ramganj is located on the Sylhet-Cox's Bazar subduction zone, according to seismologists, December 2's earthquake may be a precursor of more destructive quakes in the future. It often so happens that a bigger temblor is preceded by a number of tremors of lower magnitude. What would be the scale of devastation if an earthquake of bigger magnitude, say, between 8.2 and 8.9 on the Richter scale, strikes the capital city? What the scale of destruction would be at a place hit by an earthquake depends on a host of factors. That includes the geomorphology of the place and, if populated, how their settlement is planned. For a densely populated, unplanned, urban centre like Dhaka, it is anybody's guess what would happen. But comparing the levels of destruction caused by the earthquakes that struck Haiti and Chile within a gap of one month in 2010, one can have an idea. The strength of the Haiti quake was of 7 Mw (Moment Magnitude), while the one that struck Chile was of 8.8 Mw. From the point of view of shaking power, Chile's quake was more than 63 times stronger than that of Haiti. But compare the devastating impacts. The death toll from Chile's quake was over 500, while that from Haiti's 220,000---among them 102 United Nations staff. Also, damage to properties in Haiti quake was worth USD7.8 billion, which was 120 per cent of the country's GDP. But with Chile's GDP at USD 217.1 billion in 2010, the quake-related damage was over 13 per cent of that country's GDP. But Chile's devastation could be far greater had not the country adopted strict building code following the earthquake that it suffered a quarter century back.
In Dhaka's, case, with a population of about 20 million living in a space of 100 square miles, a temblor of, say, 8.2 Mw would cause a destruction of mind-boggling scale. According to the Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha (Rajuk)'s survey in 2018, about 86,5000 buildings would collapse in Dhaka city, if an earthquake of 6.9 magnitude strikes Madhupur fault in Tangail. The death toll would be around 210,000, while 229,000 would be injured. Now, an earthquake of 8.2 Mw being close to 20 times stronger in shaking strength than a 6.9 Mw one, it is a matter of arithmetic to determine what would that mean.
Given the doomsday scenario of an earthquake of that scale striking the capital city, our preparedness level against such an eventuality, too, should be matching. The way people panicked leading to a stampeded in a Cumilla factory is just a test case for what is also going to happen in any future case of earthquakes striking any part of the country. So, preparedness is the last word in facing any earthquake of a smaller or bigger scale than the one that struck the country on Saturday.

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