june 2009 issue
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Feature
A Retrofitted Refuge
Shree Mangal Dvip Boarding School already offered a haven for students from a life of poverty and exploitation in Nepal. But a huge problem was the lack of building standards — in an earthquake zone. A group of Edmonton engineers set out to put the structure of the school on the same page as its critical role of protecting children
BY JANE MARSHALL
Freelance Writer
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SOUND LEARNING |
Extreme poverty, no schooling, intermittent electricity, child prosti-tution and famine — these are among the many obstacles routinely faced by students before they began attending Shree Mangal Dvip Boarding School in Kathmandu, Nepal. The school is their refuge, yet even there a disturbing reality exists. Some of the very walls that protect these vulnerable children will easily crumble in the case of an earthquake.
Concern and compassion for this tiny school and its students, however, have spanned the globe in, quite literally, a concrete way. Engineers in Edmonton are making the buildings stronger and removing some of the fear and uncertainty these children face.
“Kathmandu lies in an active seismic zone and is totally unprepared for a major quake,” explains Shree Mangal Dvip director Shirley Blair, who has guided the school for the past 10 years. “There is no municipal or federal emergency plan. There will be no assistance. We will have to do search and rescue ourselves.”
Instead of being able to focus solely on studies, children are being trained to find their classmates and save lives, to set up tents and to dig latrines, says Ms. Blair. The school is also raising money for an earthquake survival fund to buy equipment for 600 people.
Help Wanted
This frightening situation prompted semi-retired civil engineer Andrew Mitchell, P.Eng., to enlist his professional peers to help protect students in what should be a safe haven of learning. Soon, the Edmonton resident was using The PEGG to recruit support.
“Building standards in Nepal are a joke. Materials are brick and concrete somewhat strengthened by iron bars, not always reinforcing steel. Nothing works in Nepal — electricity, water, sewage, ambulances, roads — and it will be worse after an earthquake,” says Mr. Mitchell. “There will be looting and killing for water and food.”
His project got rolling about seven years ago, when Mr. Mitchell showed a set of the school’s plans to several local engineers. The group decided that what the school needed was a seismic retrofit. Engineers from Janto Engineering, Stantec, UMA and BPTEC-DNW Engineering, along with a structural technologist, proceeded to volunteer hundreds of hours to the creation of detail design drawings. Nepalese workers would follow the drawings to strengthen weak walls at Shree Mangal Dvip.
Despite its structural drawbacks, the school’s ideals and roles are perfectly sound.
Founded in 1987 by an eminent Tibetan refugee and lama, Thrangu Rinpoche, the school currently comprises four buildings. In them marginalized Nepalese children, most of whom leave village homes at elevations of more than 12,000 feet, spend their time learning, eating and sleeping.
When an earthquake hits, however, chances are extremely high that the children will be inside these unstable buildings.
Stantec engineer Dean Mullin, P.Eng., now living in Fredericton, remembers when Mr. Mitchell first showed him the school’s drawings. At the time he worked for BPTEC-DNW Engineering in Edmonton.
School of Cards
“The type of construction used to build the school was susceptible to collapse in an earthquake,” he says. “It is more or less blocks surrounded by beams. When you shake it, it is very easy for the blocks to shake loose.”
In an earthquake, says Mr. Mullin, “the school would go down like a deck of cards.”
He continues: “There is very intense seismic activity in Nepal. It may not have actually had any earthquakes for several years, but they tend to be very large. This means that in between, people have lots of time to build more, vulnerable buildings.”
Nepal has almost no infrastructure left after a 10-year civil war that ended in 1996. It has no emergency measures in place. Combine that with an earthquake, and the result will be “a major impact and a serious loss of life,” says Mr. Mullin.
Antoni Kowalczewski, P.Eng., began working on the retrofit four years ago, spending long hours on his computer after full days of earning a living. The Janto Engineering principal says it’s important to give back. “I learned a lot from others and I feel that giving back knowledge makes me feel a little less guilty.”
Mr. Kowalczewski’s background as a structural engineer and time spent in Africa allowed him to envision key elements in the retrofit of the first school building. “I lived in Africa for 10 years. I found that the best way to help was not to send people something but to show them.”
Local Application
Affordable and accessible materials are crucial, and so are methods that locals can mimic and recreate. “The locals’ knowledge and equipment made this possible,” says Mr. Kowalczewski, one of the engineers who developed schematic drawings.
“The job was done in a traditional way with the only uncommon element being the epoxy used to glue to existing concrete in the reinforcement process. The exterior walls needed to be reinforced with concrete that would attach to the existing structure. I helped create resistant structures without too much cost.”
To make the building more resistant, it was important to focus on its central staircase, Mr. Kowalczewski decided. “The staircase is the most rigid portion of the building. The easiest way to strengthen it was to design a system around the staircase.”
The engineers completed the drawings, but now what? Enter Andrew Mitchell’s son, Ross Mitchell, who flew to Nepal to oversee actual implemen-tation. He spent three months super-vising the seismic retrofit and maintaining quality control.
“If there was one weak link in the building, an earthquake would find it,” explains the younger Mr. Mitchell.
The lack of workplace standards was astonishing. “There was debris all over the staircase and there were men carrying loads of 70-plus pounds on their backs while wearing flip-flops. We also had to make sure the kids were safe as they would chase balls right next to big pits,” Ross recalls.
Incredibly, the children lived in the building during construction. Ross Mitchell did what he could to ensure their safety by using “makeshift barriers and cheap sunglasses for eye protection.”
Looking Ahead
It has all, however, come together for the better. These days, the children at Shree Mangal Dvip are excelling and learning, now in a school with a much improved safety standard. Twenty students are currently tagged to study overseas, and some have been earning foreign scholarships.
In the works as well is a proposal to build a new school to green standards, outside the crowded and polluted Kathmandu Valley. The dormitories there would be single storey, and seismic codes can be applied from the beginning.
All this further allows students to live lives they could not have previously imagined. “Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world,” explains Ms. Blair, the school’s director. “It is below Burma and Congo and is the hunger spot of Asia.”
In fact more than 48 per cent of children are underweight, compared with Afghanistan’s 43 per cent. Nepal also has the highest child mortality rate in Asia.
“After 10 years of civil war, Nepal is on the verge of becoming a failed state,” Ms. Blair continues. “Children disappear every week, funneled into the sex or organ trade. For centuries, the mountain people of Nepal lived as subsistence farmers and semi-nomads, trading into Tibet for goods like metal, salt and fuel, but the occupation of Tibet made cross-border trade impossible.”
Because of conditions in Nepal, Ms. Blair’s role as school director carries many extra responsibilities. She has even had to defend the school from attackers.
But the skills and the hundreds of hours of time engineers have donated will ease Ms. Blair’s mind. Upgrading of the first phase of the dormitory building is complete, and — thanks to donated funds — Ms. Blair was even able to get wrought iron stairwells installed, which act as emergency exits.
“These guys are incredibly busy and it is wonderful that they could help out,” says Andrew Mitchell.
Saving children will get that kind of a response. Mr. Mitchell notes that in China’s last major quake, 9,000 children died. “If the average height of a child is four feet, their bodies, laid head to toe, would cover seven miles.”
NEPAL FACTS
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The UN notes that Nepal is located where the Indian tectonic plate wedges under the Tibetan plate. Because of movements and formation of the Earth’s crust, earthquakes frequently occur.
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Nepal was rocked by a civil war between 1996 and 2006.
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Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world.
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18,000 children die each year from treatable diarrhea.
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Three out of four children die before they turn five.
More Info
www.himalayanchildren.org
amgmitchell@gmail.com
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