ASSIGNMENT 1: ENGIEERING

SEISMOLOGY

SUBMITTED BY:

NIRMAL MARASINI

ME07607

SUBMITTED TO:

DEPARTMENT OF EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING

KHWOPA ENGINEERING COLLEGE

LIBALI, BHAKTAPUR
During your student life and/or professional life as a civil engineer, you might have
encountered many things related to earthquake and its effect in the structure. Please write in
more than 400 words about those incidents/thoughts/ideas/questions and how did you deal
with them. If the problem you encountered was unsolved, what do you think might have been
the best solution?

As a civil engineer, working with a motivation of developing my country, I have always tried to
give my level best to build a safer community. From the starting of my career, the devastating
effects of Gorkha Earthquake has always been deep rooted within me, and I have always
imagined myself working in the filed of Earthquake Engineering and the Post Graduate program
I have recently joined has become a ‘dream come true’ for me.

The term earthquake itself has a negative impact in the society we live in, let alone be the
devastation it creates. I have seen a lot of seismic hazards in my professional career. We all have
seen Dharahara being collapsed and will always remain as a bad memory throughout our life.
And some other well-designed structures also collapsed namely hydropower dams and other
important structures. Small and big cracks, ruptures were seen in highways and roads, small and
massive landslides also occurred in hilly areas. Furthermore, many cultural and historical
structures like temple and palaces were completely or partially affected. Most interesting thing
that happened during Gorkha Earthquake was the resistance of non-engineered or load bearing
structures in Patan and Bhaktapur area against failure. Failure pattern of the structure were also
different in different areas. Some structures were damaged completely through brittle
deformation some were damaged just by overturning from basement and some structure did
exhibit settlement. Thousands of people died, thousands were homeless and thousands got
injured.

Before the massive Gorkha earthquake, I had felt some minor earthquakes even though I hadn’t
seen such a devastating loss and damage of life, property and livelihood. Hence, my attention
wasn’t much drawn in the field of earthquake and earthquake engineering. I was pursuing my
career in Bachelors in Civil engineering and had started to gain some knowledge about
geological science, tectonics, plate theories which had given me some basic knowledge about
earth’s inner structure, and the movement of plates and how it affects the structures and buildings
that we encounter in our daily life. After the devastating effect of Gorkha earthquake, our
teachers and us, as a student started to giving concern and interest in earthquake engineering. We
were taken the affected areas and we got a chance to learn and study failure pattern of different
structures, Furthermore, our mentor also described why the different type of failures occur in
different parts of the structure and the main governing factor behind that failure. Local people
started to raise questions and curiosities about Gorkha earthquake and why the different types of
failure occurred in different area? Me, as a civil engineering student I have always tried to give
my level best to answer that type of questions and I started to learn about earthquake and started
to learn some structural analyzing tools like SAP, Etabs, SAFE etc. But I only learnt the design
process not the basic phenomena. That is why I joined earthquake engineering with the hope of
answering all my curiosities about earthquake engineering and its basic phenomena and I’m sure
that, I will definitely get much knowledge and will solve all the problem and question I have
faced before. Having said that, this would not be an easy task by any means but with the help of
infrastructures and the teaching-learning mechanism of Khwopa Engineering College would
surely play a pivoting role in the transition that I am willing to make.