Even a moderate quake can wreck Mussoorie

An assessment of one of India’s most famous hill towns shows more than 600 of its lifeline buildings are under severe threat and should be either retrofitted or replaced on a priority basis. The  scientists, however, refused to identify the buildings which are at the maximum risk saying it would trigger a controversy.

Mussoorie is also home to septuagenarian author Ruskin Bond and veteran actors like Victor Banerjee and Tom Alter. All of them stay at Landour, which is about 3 km from Mussoorie. The hill town houses many schools. Mussoorie falls within zone-4 of India’s earthquake zoning map, which means the picturesque town from the Raj era can witness a moderately high earthquake.

The team from the department of disaster management in Uttarakhand surveyed 3,344 structures in 11 wards of Mussoorie and Landour to identify what could be the extent of death and property loss from the most vulnerable buildings in case if an earthquake strikes.

The estimate was restricted to only those buildings that would experience a grade-5 or grade-4 damage. Grade-5 means complete collapse of the structure which cannot be rebuilt whereas grade-4 indicates serious structural damage.

Taking the town’s 2001 population as the baseline, the team found only 369 people would receive “grievous injury” and economic loss will be around Rs 238 crore.
Considering the tourist influx, this appears to be an underestimate.

“When an earthquake strikes, people living in houses with grade-3 or grade-2 damage can also be hurt or killed. We have not taken those into account in the present study,” team leader Piyoosh Rautela told Deccan Herald from Dehradun. Trained seismic risk evaluators surveyed 3,344 buildings in 2008-09, the oldest of whom was built in 1836. They found more than 600 houses (close to 18 percent) are at grave risk. “Most of the houses were built before 1950,” Rautela said.

Only 6 percent of the buildings constructed in the post-1984 phase showed high probability of grade 5 damage and very high probability of grade 4 damage. This showed growing compliance of the seismic safety norms with the passage of time, the scientists reported in the latest issue of “Current Science.”

He recommended retrofitting in his paper. However,  Rautela said retrofitting on such a large-scale was out of the question as India did not have the expertise. “Awareness is the only option to save Mussoorie-Landour,” he said.