Investigating Community Resilience in Gorkha, Nepal

Abstract eng:
Following the M7.8 earthquake on April 25, 2015 in Nepal, an international research team of several academic and practitioner experts in earthquake engineering, disaster management, and medicine spent two weeks (spread over one year) in Nepal documenting its impact. This paper uses multidisciplinary reconnaissance observations collected roughly one month (EERI/NSET reconnaissance team) after the earthquake and then again one year (PEER/EERI reconnaissance team) after the earthquake to assess community impact and recovery, with a specific focus on the health care sector. The timing of the earthquake (i.e., at noon on a Saturday) helped minimize the casualties of the disaster, but even so, nearly 9,000 people lost their lives and more than 22,000 were injured due to the earthquake. The World Health Organization’s Global Health Cluster Report indicates that of those lost and injured, 18 and 68 were health workers, respectively (WHO, 2015). With these human impacts, there were high demands on the healthcare system that is critical in the immediate aftermath of a disaster for emergency response and long term for the well being of the community. The paper presents a method for collecting field data after disasters that focuses on assessing the resilience of an individual community sector: healthcare. A structured survey was designed to collect damage and loss-of-function data immediately after the earthquake and recovery data one year after the earthquake. The acute data collection phase focused on damage to structural and nonstructural components and utilities, as well as assess loss of staff and resources supporting key hospital services provided by the facility. The long-term data collection focused on the repair efforts of the physical damage, the recovery of critical lifelines and other resources, and the return of clinical and non-clinical personnel. The paper then presents preliminary data on the impact to a single healthcare facility, Bir Hospital. Bir Hospital is a tertiary referral and teaching hospital located in the heart of Kathmandu City that was established in 1889 and had a capacity of 460 beds before the Gorkha earthquake. Disaster response and recovery differs by community size, organization type, degree of direct seismic impact, and preparedness and mitigation efforts prior to the earthquake; the case study of a healthcare facility presented in this paper is one of several resilience studies by the EERI and PEER teams.

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