EPICentre visit earthquake damaged schools in Nepal

Nepalese schools were heavily devastated by the 2015 Nepal earthquake, affecting around 7,000 schools across the country.

In April 2018, Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering (CEGE) EPICentre members Professor Dina D’Ayala and Rohit Kumar Adhikari visited Kathmandu to conduct seismic assessment of Nepalese load bearing masonry school buildings, as part of the World Bank’s Global Program for Safer Schools project.

Vibek Manandhar from National Society for Earthquake Technology-Nepal (NSET), also joined the team during the field surveys. He is a former student of the CEGE MSc Earthquake Engineering with Disaster Management and a Chevening scholar. The British Embassy and the British Council in Nepal are committed to assist in improving the infrastructure resilience in Nepal and have been providing Chevening Scholarship to Nepalese students to pursue one year masters’ course in the UK to study various subjects including civil and structural engineering.

The team also held a series of meetings with engineers from Ministry of Education, Nepal; Prof Prem Nath Maskey and Dr Basanta Raj Adhikari from Institute of Engineering, Tribhuvan University; Dr Ramesh Guragain and Ranjan Dhungel from NSET-Nepal and Gehendra Gurung from Practical Action Nepal Office. Engineers from the Ministry of Education accompanied the EPICentre team to visit some of the successfully retrofitted schools that survived the 2015 Nepal earthquake. The survey team visited both the existing as well as newly constructed and under construction school buildings, collecting data on their architectural and structural characteristics which are required for their seismic risk assessment.

During their stay in Kathmandu, the EPICentre team also met HE Richard Morris, the British Ambassador to Nepal. He showed great interest in EPICentre engagement in Nepal to improve the seismic resilience of school infrastructure.​