TNs seat of power on shaky ground

CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu’s official seat of power, Fort St George, has poor resistance to earthquakes and no measures have been taken till date to improve its seismic resistance, said earthquake engineer AR Shantakumar delivering a lecture on Monday at Anna University on how prepared Chennai was to handle earthquakes.Chennai’s ever growing skyline of private flats and office spaces are equally ill-equipped in resisting any seismic activity due to ill-planned construction. While the seismic code for Chennai was revised from zone - 2 to a more vulnerable zone - 3 in 2002, the architecture of St. George may not even tolerate seismic activity of zone - 2 level intensity, said the professor, who also added that the safety levels of other important public buildings like the Madras High Court, Anna University and Madras University were no better.“The only building which has plans for undertaking seismic resistant modifications is the Corporation building, which is also yet to be implemented,” he said.“More than the buildings, infrastructure like bridges and roads are subjected to more serious damages during earthquakes,” Shantakumar said. Bridges like the ones on Pantheon road and TTK road were recipes for disaster as they were built on single tier column and that too in a curve. “A good bridge should be like the one on Dr. Radhakrishnan road which has 2-tier column and hence nothing can happen to it.” Quoting a survey by IIT-M, Shantakumar said that 7 out of the 8 buildings surveyed, had absolutely no quake resistance. He said that demand for better designed buildings were causing flouting of safety rules by builders.  Pointing out policy lapses, Shantakumar stated, “certain rules of CMDA resulted in construction of building columns in a manner unhealthy for dealing with quakes.” Sensing the emergency, a study is being carried out by the Anna University on the quake resistance of all buildings. All government buildings in the city and all private buildings with more than 6 floors will be studied. “The data obtained will be handed over to the government for working out future policy decisions.”