SKIMEQIS: An Effective Information Tool of Seismic Disaster Resilience for Sikkim Himalayan Region
摘要
Seismic disaster resilience defines the early preparation of communities to resist themselves for future earthquakes taking cues from past earthquakes and their impacts. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) highlighted the importance of Disaster Risk Reduction (SDG-11) for growing cities and settlements, where a target has been fixed to promote inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable growth of the settlements by adjusting to any kind of disasters. The entire Himalayan region is highly prone to seismicity (Zone-IV & V), where the occurrence of earthquakes has increased in the last few decades. The development of unplanned settlements and their extensive growth in this region makes them more vulnerable towards seismically-induced damages. Hence, it is necessary to focus on seismic disaster resilience for the existing settlements in the Himalayan region. Geoinformatics-based customization is capable of developing advanced information tools, which have the ability to visualize integrated geospatial information in a common platform. The present study attempts to develop the Sikkim Earthquake Information System (SKIMEQIS), an effective tool of seismic disaster resilience for the Sikkim Himalayan region using ArcObject programming in VB. NET (Visual Basic. Network Enabled Technologies) framework by the preparation of various graphical user interfaces. To understand the impact of seismological parameters on the existing settlements, this tool visualizes thematic and analytical information together, which depicts that the central part of Sikkim along the Main Central Thrust (MCT) and Ramgarh Thrust (RT) thrust zone coincides with the major earthquake epicenters, where magnitude varies between 3.5 and 5. Major settlements such as Gangtok, Namchi, Ranipool, and Singtam are already developed in this active seismic zone. Suitable decisions for the expansion of these settlements and further development plans can be decided by analyzing the seismological parameters through the SKIMEQIS, which will be helpful as an effective tool for disaster resilience by visualizing the seismic risk factors on settlements.