COUNTRY DEVASTATED

Evening Post, Issue 20, 23 July 1935, Page 7

COUNTRY DEVASTATED

BIHAB-XEPAL SHAKE

A GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION

Vast tracts of earthquake-riven country, shattered towns, and villages that held nothing but rubble, were the legacy of the shock suffered in the Bihar-Nepal region, India, on January 15 of last year; and to those who heard Dr. J. Alexander Dunn, F.G.S., of the Geological Survey of India, when he addressed the Wellington Philosophical Society, the full enormity of the occurrence was brought home, not only in description, but in an excellent series of lantern slides. «- Fortunately, the shock came just after 2 o'clock in the afternoon, which gave inhabitants of the area a reasonable chance of escaping. The disturbance was immediately preceded by sound, and people soon found it difficult to stand. Trees swayed and whipped wildly, in some cases almost touching the ground. Water spurted out as innumerable fountains, and overflowed from wells over many miles of country, and ejected sand choked up the wells. Polished lumps of clay and even wood were occasionally thrown out in areas where sand went to a depth of 300 feet. The water in places was reported as being decidedly warm, suggesting its propulsion from. a minimum depth of 2000 feet. Fissures which were the secondary effect of the earthquake, and which resulted from slumping of the alluvium, opened, and were filled immediately with sand. Landslides were common in the Himalayas. Brick and girder bridges collapsed and screw-pile bridges were distorted, railway lines were twisted, and river banks closed in several feet; buildings were, destroyed'either by subsidence of the foundations or by collapse from shaking. STRAIN ON A FRACTURE. After summarising the features of waves set up by an earthquake, Dr. Dunn pointed out the significance of certain movements-which occurred during the Bihar disturbance. The old idea that earthquakes of that magnitude had their origin at a focal point had long since given place to the belief that the disturbance was along a fracture—sudden yielding of the crust without actual fracture might be a frequent cause. It was possible that a wide area of the crust had been under strain prior to the Bihar earth-' quake, perhaps for several hundred miles north and south of the line of weakness. During the earthquake the whole strained zone oscillated in an east-west direction, every part radiating earth-waves—no single point could be considered as the focus, which might explain the time anomalies that" often occurred in the arrival of waves, at different seismograph stations. The epicentral region of the BiharNepal earthquake was in the Gangetic Plains, and the cause of the disturbance was probably connected with' the stability relations between . the,: plains and the Himalayas.' Whether the hills were formed from overthrusting from the north.or underthrusting from the south was immaterial; the region between the Peninsula and the central Asian plateau was one of.weakness. The shock, said Dr. Dunn, was felt over a radius of about 1000 miles by human beings: several pilgrims came in from Lhasa, and they were quite definite that it was. fairly violent in Tibet One of the most amazing features'of the earthquake was that for 200 miles, with an average width of 20 miles, the whole countryside slumped There might have been a certain amount of uplift in certain territories. The damage to buildings was not so much due to shaking down as to the subsiding of the foundations. ■ Many were still standing, but the foundations had dropped, in some cases about eight feet. ■■' FREAKS OF BALANCE. Some remarkable freaks of balance were to be seen in the slides shown by Dr Dunn. In the middle of a devastated countryside stood a tall pillar, surmounted by a lion, which had stood for 2000 years, probably through many shocks; and the only effect the earthquake had was to swing the lion round 45 degrees anti-clockwise. The headquarters of members of the Everest flight expedition in 1933 were shown— the whole centre of the house had simply crashed and the outer wall sub- " Only one European had been killed in the whole of the earthquake area, as a result of which the Indians thought the white men must be very good people, as the earthquake would not kill them! ' . - At the,close of the address a vote of thanks was moved by Dr. J. Henderson The chairman was Dr: P. Mar-