SHILLONG: Deputy Chief Minister and in charge of Revenue and Disaster Management, RC Laloo maintained that resilience building practices such as Rapid Visual Screening (RVS) and retrofitting has become the need of the hour as the threat of earthquakes of small and big magnitude looms large.
He was speaking during the inauguration of the three-day training programme held on seismic safety assessment of building in Rapid Visual Screening (RVS) and retrofitting, Shillong on Tuesday. The programme will conclude on Thursday.
He said that there is an urgent need to assess the seismic vulnerability of buildings in urban areas of Meghalaya as an essential component of a comprehensive disaster risk management policy.
“It is, therefore, very important to use simpler procedures like Rapid Visual Screening (RVS) that can easily help to evaluate the vulnerability profile of different types of buildings so that more complex evaluation procedures can be limited to the most critical buildings,” he said.
Referring to the urban scenario in the state, he said, “Rapid urbanisation has led to proliferation of slums and congestion of our urban areas. Most recent construction in the urban areas consists of poorly designed and constructed buildings.”
Laloo also spoke about increasing awareness among city residents regarding seismic vulnerability of buildings and different conventional as well as state of the art on seismic retrofitting techniques are available to increase the strength and or ductility of reinforced and un-reinforced concrete structures.
PW Ingty, Additional Chief Secretary, Department of Revenue and Disaster Management, pointed out that there is a huge gap in technical knowledge in the state and the training programme will provide the much needed information.
Later, Amir Ali Khan from National Institute of Disaster Management (NIDM) spoke to reporters about RVS who stated that it is a screening of buildings to find if there are flaws in the buildings. He said, “RVS is done only for existing buildings.”
“Retrofitting will come in place if found that there are flaws in the buildings,” he said, even as he stated that there are basic mistakes that people make during construction.
He said that engineers will be provided training and people need to be sensitized on the matter as knowledge of earthquake safety is necessary.
The training programme is a joint initiative by the NIDM, Union Ministry of Home Affairs and State Disaster Management Authority, Shillong.
The RVS training motto is to evaluate earthquake safety, with special motivation towards the health assessment of built-up facilities by RVS.
Another part of its motto is the need to generate awareness among the vulnerable community in Shillong city, Meghalaya towards structural safety auditing of buildings.
RVS of building is a simple tool to classify vulnerability class based on professional judgement. RVS procedure is intended as an initial screening method for qualitative ranking of buildings to determine the need for more detailed seismic evaluation.
The method is based on field inspection, visual signage of vulnerabilities like falling hazards, setbacks, geometric irregularities etc.
The data so collected are checked by selective field tests on the structural integrity, which finally incorporate expert comments.