Earthquake-prone Nepal is expediting the approval of a disaster management legislation following the devastation caused by a massive earthquake in Haiti last January. The measure outlines preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery strategies at the national level, IRIN reports.
“The Haiti disaster has increased significant awareness in Nepal on earthquakes and we hope that it will scale up action so that we won’t have a potential Haiti here,” said Wendy Cue, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Kathmandu.
Home Ministry official Thir Bahadur GC said government will soon be strictly implementing building codes and improve its preparedness programs.
Experts have predicted that Nepal will be struck with another massive earthquake in the future, approximately in similar magnitude of the recent Chilean earthquake. “This size of earthquake will not just double or triple the size of the magnitude 7.0 Haiti earthquake in terms of energy release, but [be] thousands of times larger,” said John Galetzka, a field geologist at the California Institute of Technology.
