Kashmir Earthquake

The majority of the buildings in the affected area in Kashmir are non-engineered reinforced wall construction. The damage of most of the buildings is from ground shaking. Even though, due to the landslide, a large number of buildings located mostly on or near slopes were damaged. It has been announced in BBC news that 30%-50% of the buildings were either destroyed or badly damaged in the main event in Muzaffarabad. The major damaged areas in Muzaffarabad and Balakot were relatively along the Neelum and Jhelum rivers and directly related to the fault rupture. Kashmir earthquake caused uncountable destruction all over Kashmir.

Schools and Hospitals:

All the schools in Kashmir are government built and owned. Kashmir has many communities and each community has its own elementary school. The majority of the school was destroyed totally and some of them are partially. From sketchy evidence, it has been reported that the proportion of catastrophic damage of schools is higher than the non-governmental building in the same areas. The lack of seismic design and the awful quality of construction are the main two reasons behind these building collapses.

Not only the schools, there were so many hospitals that were destroyed during the quake. Many patients and workers were injured and there was a critical care facility lost due to lack of a proper post-earthquake assessment process. A number of house owners were unsure about the safety and relocated their homes to distant town or tents because of the unqualified personnel, even though their homes did not appear to have any significant damage.