Amid Katmandu's Earthquake Wreckage, Hints of a Shift to Safer Construction

May 1, 2015 | Andrew C. Revkin
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In the world’s crowded earthquake zones, fromthe Himalayas to the Pacific Northwest, every community faces enormous challenges in designing for inevitable, but unpredictable jolts. This challenge is particularly acute in poor or poorly governed places. And Nepal is both, as Ilan Kelman, an expert on risk and resilience at University College London, made vividly clear in “How earthquake safety measures could have saved thousands of lives in Nepal,” a piece on The Conversation website. But there’s much that can be done with education and sustained effort to overcome corrosive forces like corruption in construction practices and oversight, and ignorance.