Sat, Nov 22, 2003 page9

• Earthquake-spotters struggle to protect Tajikistan

  Hard-pressed researchers may have discovered a method for predicting disaster, but much of their equipment has been destroyed

  • By Paul Brown / THE GUARDIAN
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  Lake Sarez was formed in 1911, when the side of a mountain fell into a valley during an earthquake. Its 16km3 of water now sit poised, 3,300m up in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan, above the homes of 5 million people.

  Another earthquake is due in this remote and beautiful region of central Asia, and when it comes, the people below will be in serious danger. Today, a team of five people works shifts to keep a watch on the dam wall. Their task is to warn those in the most immediate danger -- the 45,000 people who live in 150 villages in the valley below -- if the water looks like it might burst through. There won't be much warning though. If an earthquake does disrupt the lake, the water will crash downhill at 1.6km a minute, which will give the population around 16 minutes to run for it.

  It is an irony that, but for the collapse of the Soviet Union and a subsequent civil war, the local residents might have had much more warning, because Tajikistan's scientists claim to have developed the only reliable earthquake prediction unit in the world.

  The Sarez lake threat is one of a number of potential seismic disaster zones in this extremely earthquake-prone part of the world, where high dams and cities have been built on fault lines. There are upwards of 4,000 tremors in the average year and soon, in fact any day now, the country is expecting the next big one. The large earthquake cycle is every 80 to 130 years in this part of the world, and the quake that created Lake Sarez happened 92 years ago. The last big earthquake in the capital, Dushanbe, was in 1907.

  Sobit Negmatoullaev, director of the Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Seismology at the Academy of Sciences in Dushanbe, calculates that a repeat of the 1907 quake, which measured 7.4 on the Richter scale, would kill 55,000 people in the capital and injure many more.

  "We are truly living on borrowed time here," he says. "I do not wish to be alarmist, but the cycle of earthquakes means a big one is due. And it has gone quiet on our machines. By that I mean each year we would normally have a lot of small tremors as the plates moved against each other but that has stopped for a few years. We still feel them from Afghanistan but nothing from around here. It makes me believe the next shock could be the big one."

  In the Soviet era, his institute was the centre of expertise on seismic activity for the whole communist bloc. They set off giant explosions in the desert to calculate how to build flats and other buildings to withstand similar shocks from an earthquake.

  When I visit, Negmatoullaev shows me astonishing archive footage of full-scale earthquake simulations, with whole blocks of flats built for the sole purpose of seeing whether they remain standing while the ground is made to tremor with a series of explosions.

  But their most important research has been in working out how to warn people of impending danger, and in this area, the team has had some apparent success. After 20 years of theorizing and measurements, the professor came up with what he thought was a reliable method. In 1989, two weeks before a quake in Hissar, north of Dushanbe, he had a chance to test his theory.

  His team recorded an unexplained disturbance in the ionosphere, which he believed might be connected with an impending earthquake. Forty-eight hours before the quake took place, there was a pressure anomaly in the atmosphere above Hissar, apparently unconnected with the weather.

  Negmatoullaev predicted an imminent earthquake, but thought it would not be severe. Indeed, it was only 5 on the Richter scale but 272 people died; he had not accounted for the fact that the soil in the area was saturated because of excessive irrigation. The quake created a mud slide that swept away a number of houses.

  The paper he wrote about the Hissar quake, which he claims as a world first in reliably predicting an earthquake, generated considerable scientific interest in the Soviet Union and the West.

  "It was one of a number of prediction methods we tried and it seemed to work," he says. "It seemed to me it would not work everywhere because, say, in Japan or other coastal regions, the weather is so changeable because of winds it would not be possible to spot anomalies so precisely or easily. But here in the middle of a continent where the pressure is stable for long periods it worked."

  He believes the anomaly was caused by pressure in the Earth's crust, just prior to the quake, causing deformation and fluidity of materials in the crust. This caused electrons to be released, which he was able to measure as a disturbance in the ionosphere.

  The idea is still controversial, and Negmatoullaev has not had the chance to test his idea again.

  The breakdown of the Soviet Union meant that the centre's work was underfunded but, in the Tajikistan civil war that followed, worse was to come. In 1995, angry factions machine-gunned the sophisticated machinery used for earthquake detection and prediction, which was the pride of the academy.

  Goulsara Pulatova, who developed the scheme for warning the villagers below Lake Sarez, and is chairman of the Tajikistan disaster preparedness committee, says: "They literally shot to death the equipment. If we still had it, who knows how many lives we might save in the future."

  The academy used to have 45 seismic stations, but now only 18 are operating. Its prediction equipment for measuring atmospheric anomalies was completely destroyed.

  The disaster committee hopes to raise US$255,000 for four new stations, and another US$2.38 million to reconstruct the necessary earthquake warning equipment for Dushanbe.

  "We might save thousands of lives if we could give people 48 hours to get out of the city," Negmatoullaev says. "For US$2 million we could have the equipment. The cost of earthquake damage in a city with no warning is US$1billion. We could save a lot of that."
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