By C. Welton-Mitchell, R. Awale, L. James, and S. Khanal.
January 2017, 16th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering.
Following the Nepal, Gorkha, M7.8 earthquake on April 25, 2015 a research team of several academic and practitioner experts in earthquake engineering, community resilience, and risk reduction, spent a week in Nepal to document the impact the earthquake had in Bhaktapur and surrounding districts. Strategic goals of the reconnaissance team included ‘investigating recovery and resilience related issues’, along with the more traditional pursuits. Over the course of 8 days, two social scientists with the team collected information from 80 community members about cultural, psychological and social factors with implications for rebuilding and future disaster preparedness. Results from this rapid assessment highlight community perspective on the following topics: culturally specific disaster attributions, psychological distress, preferred means of coping, social support, community conflicts, livelihood implications and other economic impacts, and concerns with governance and corruption – providing a snapshot of the situation in the early aftermath of the earthquake.
Read 16th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering Paper 2243: Investigating Community Resilience in Bhaktapur District and Surrounding Areas in Nepal following the 2015 Earthquake (1MB pdf)
