And while some high-rise buildings in Ahmedabad plummetted into a concrete graveyard, raising the stench of death, the oil refinery at Jamnagar stood its ground. The refinery is a potential bomb, and any collapse would cause friction of metal leading to a big 'Boom'. Experts say there's a lesson in this, crying to be learnt. All good constructions did withstand the tremors. And buildings, he claims, can easily be made quake-resistant.
Buildings collapse when the joints come apart, with beams falling over the columns.
Very rarely would a concrete beam or column itself collapse. It just takes some extra steel to reinforce the junctions and make the building quake resistant. In terms of the bottomline, the additional investment is less than one per cent of the total. Dr Ravi Sinha of the Indian Institute of Technology avers with Thapar's view. The joint is certainly the weakest link.