Sylhet Bureau :
A team of experts formed by the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources has visited Sylhet to find out the cause of the recent tremors that shook the city within the span of nine days.
On Sunday, they visited several wells of Sylhet Gas Fields Limited in Haripur and Golapganj areas of the district.
Quoting the team members, Senior Meteorologist in Sylhet Saeed Chowdhury said that drilling at the ninth well of Haripur field had remained stopped for the last few months.
The committee was formed with Petrobangla Director (Product Sharing Contract) Engineer Md Shahinur Islam as the convener and a general manager (GM) level officer of Bangladesh Petroleum Exploration and Production Company Limited (Bapex), a GM of Petrobangla and two professors of Dhaka University as members.
Md Shahinur Islam told that they had collected information in Sylhet from Friday to Sunday, and would submit a report to Petrobangla soon. ÒThe results will be shared with other organisations through a proper channel.
The five-member team on Sunday also went to Raja GC High School, where one of the buildings developed cracks due to the latest earthquake that hit on June 7. Earlier, the city corporation authorities shut down 25 risky buildings.
The experts had a meeting with Sylhet Divisional Commissioner Md Khalilur Rahman on Saturday, while the Petrobangla director visited the Haripur gas field.
Bangladesh has long been extracting gas and oil from some major wells in Sylhet, which is located near the Dawki Fault, responsible for a number of devastating quakes for over a century, and most of the epicentres were near the city, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS).
Drilling at the ninth well in Haripur field commenced on October 1 last year to unearth natural gas, mineral gas or crude oil.
Officials said in January that the new gas reserve had been found at a depth of 1,998 meters underground and that it would produce 188 barrels or 7 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.
In quest of natural gas, the then Pakistan Petroleum Limited (PPL) in 1955 commenced drilling activities at Haripur, a small village under Jaintapur police station in Sylhet district near the border.
There were two moderate earthquakes in Sylhet on May 29 and May 30 accompanied by three aftershocks. Another tremor was felt on the evening of June 7.
Last year, two strong earthquakes hit Sylhet city – a magnitude 4.2 tremor on June 3 and a 4.5 one on January 27.
Concerned by the series of tremors, the Sylhet City Corporation (SCC) authorities began working with Shahjalal University of Science and Technology (Sust) to identify the risky buildings in the city.
On Sunday, the expertsÕ team also sat with Sust Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science Dr Mushtaq Ahmed.
In 2009, the government announced that 24,000 out of the 52,000 buildings surveyed in Sylhet town were at risk from earthquakes.
