NEWS report said that the Japanese government has taken an initiative to make vulnerable building of the country’s garment factories safe for the RMG workers through conducting a ‘retrofitting technology’ to make the building jolt resistant to face situation like earthquake and other safety hazards. We believe it is a timely project to improve the safety of our high-rise buildings as well and the earthquake in Nepal has come as an eye opener to use the technology to develop our capacity in this regard. The technique, which Japan is making available to us under a project, will make our buildings earthquake resistance by strengthening their capacity to withstand big shocks. Japan International Cooperation (JICA) initially took the project after the Rana Plaza tragedy and a seminar on the new technique held discussion on its application on Saturday in the city organized by Public Works Department with technical support of JICA.
The focus of the project is to use disaster resistant techniques of construction and retrofitting in public buildings to improve their capacity to sustain tremors and such other big jolts. JICA experts have already started work to do the retrofit at two RMG factories initially while waiting for a large project soon to cover more vulnerable RMG buildings of the country. Meanwhile, they have also created a Tk 100 crore fund with Bangladesh Bank for financing the RMG owners to make their buildings safe for the workers.
We welcome the move of the Japanese government and believe that it may cover more commercial buildings, which are housing other kind of factories and businesses. Moreover, we see its relevance to other high-rise buildings and apartment housings; which also need to be shock resistant by updating their structural design and tremor absorbing capacity. The Japanese technique may be expensive but equally applicable to such buildings. Dhaka is already a sprawling city and expanding on daily basis but most of its high-rise buildings lack tremor resistant technique. As a result, they are vulnerable to disaster anytime and the earthquake in Nepal has come as a fresh reminder to do our ground work to make the city safe as far as possible by using new technology.
We know Dhaka is located over several geological fault lines making it moderately vulnerable to tremor hit. This is a very crowded city with narrow lanes and insufficient streets are not enough to allow any quick rescue operation. Moreover, the country lacks equipment and trained manpower to face such a disaster and better we start remodelling our buildings with shock resistant technique without losing time.
