Neither Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha nor Dhaka City Corporation could make any headway in identifying or pulling down the risky structures in capital city, as the two organisations had promised to do after a number of residential and other buildings collapsed in June claiming many lives.
Officials attributed the failures to absence of needed expertise and equipment in the two organisations for the job.
A committee, constituted by Rajuk, shortly after a number of buildings collapsed, is yet to identify and notify the risky buildings in the city.
The public still await Rajuk to come up with a list of the city’s risky buildings.
According to Rajuk officials, the authorised officers submitted a list of approximately 500 buildings they had identified manually.
They said that they had to do it manually as Rajuk does not have the needed technology for the task.
They also said that Rajuk refrained from making the list of risky buildings public as it could create panic among the city dwellers.
‘It would, obviously, take more time to scan lakhs of building in the city to identify the risky ones, a Herculean task,’ they said.
Initially, they said, the authorised officers identified some buildings.
‘Now we are scrutinising the list,’ Sheikh Abdul Mannan, a director in Rajuk, and also the member secretary of the committee, told New Age Thursday.
Replying to a question, he said, Rajuk did not have the technology to identify risky buildings or to ascertain whether or not under construction buildings were being built properly.
He said that Rajuk was examining whether or not Rajuk or the DCC had the jurisdiction to identify and demolish risky buildings.
He said that Rajuk officials and engineers were expected to put forward at a meeting on next Sunday a set of proposals on how to identify and demolish the risky structures.
Similarly, DCC also remains handicapped in identifying the city’s risky buildings.
So far, said officials, the city corporation succeeded in identifying no more than 113 buildings, mostly heritage structures, limiting its survey only in certain parts of the old town.
They said that DCC conducted the technical survey with technical support provided by a team from Thailand.
They said that DCC requested Rajuk to protect and preserve 93 out of 113 heritage buildings in the Old Town of the city.
The owners had been notified to dismantle the 20 other buildings, said DCC chief Town Planner Sirajul Islam.
He said the owners of a number of these risky buildings started re-strengthening their structures and the others engaged developers to demolish and build new structures.
Replying to a question, he said, the city corporation could not carry out any study to identify the city’s risky buildings due to fund shortage.
A CDMP survey conducted in 2009 found 72,000 buildings in the city, which would not be able to withstand quakes.
Experts, however, raised questions about the reliability of CDMP list of risky buildings due to the use of no scientific methodology in identifying them.
Munaz Ahmed Noor, a structural engineer and teacher at BUET, expressed doubts about the use of appropriate methodology in identifying the city’s 72,000 risky buildings.
He said that his guess was that the buildings were identified using manual technology.
