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Stress on making bridges quake-resistant

HT Correspondent
Kanpur, January 23

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EMINENT PROFESSORS of the Civil Engineering Department at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-K) stressed on the need for adopting latest construction technology for building earthquake-resistant bridges in the country to minimise losses to life and the property due to unpredictable seismic activity.

Professors who delivered lectures at an ongoing training programme at the Institute, unanimously supported the idea of making the bridges safer in the interest of the people and the nations security as well. They said though there was no fool-proof technology, which could provide absolute protection to bridges or buildings in the wake of tremors, yet efforts could be made to minimise the losses. Referring to the serious damage to the 268-metre-long and 7.5metre-wide main bridge connecting the North Andamans to the Middle Andamans during the Tsunami waves and the earthquake on December 26, they said the basic philosophy of earthquake-resistant bridge design should be that the small to medium earthquakes could be resisted without significant damage. The stress should be that the effect of the earthquake remained within the elastic range and during high intensity quakes, the bridges did not collapse at all, they added. However, they said that the biggest hurdle in constructing the quakeresistant bridges was that even today they were being constructed with the traditional elastic system, which was unfit for protecting the bridges against the seismic activity. They suggested that instead of pursuing the traditional system of Non Linear Analysis the Linear Elastic Analysis system should be adopted for constructing bridges.

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