Visakhapatnam: Three-day meet on disaster risk reduction concludes

Visakhapatnam: Three-day online national training programme on 'Disaster Risk Reduction in Resilient Infrastructure' concluded on Friday.

The programme was hosted by The Department of Civil Engineering, Andhra University College of Engineering and National Institute of Disaster Management (NIDM), New Delhi in association with Indian Geotechnical Society, Visakhapatnam Chapter.

During the training programme, lectures were delivered on 'Disaster Risk Analysis' by G L Sivakumar Babu from IISc, Bangalore and 'Issues of Field Monitoring of Landslides' by IIT Indore Neelima Satyam.

Speaking on the occasion, Sivakumar Babu stressed the need for multiple disaster analysis of a structure and to adopt reliability-based design for reducing the risk against natural disasters. He suggested using data driven approach in the design of structures.

Neeelima Satyam from IIT Indore presented the issues of monitoring rainfall induced landslides using tilt sensors, soil moisture recording devices and rainfall gauges with a case study. University of Ottawa, Canada Sai Vanapalli said the change in behavior of unsaturated soil upon saturation is responsible for loss of shear strength of soil and leads to landslides in steep soil slopes.

Coordinator of the programme C N V Satyanarayana Reddy urged the participants to focus on results of the forensic studies of failures from earlier disasters and adopt suitable design strategy.

NIDM, New Delhi Amir Ali Khan, Head, Department of Civil Engineering, AU T V Praveen, Karl Von Terzaghi and about 300 participants comprising practicing engineers, academicians and research scholars participated in the training programme.