How many warnings does Dhaka need?

Dhaka’s unplanned growth has made it dangerously vulnerable to earthquakes, with 55 to 60 percent of the city falling within zones of liquefaction. But a greater danger may not be the shaking itself but from fires resulting from it. A report in this daily highlights warnings from experts that a major earthquake could trigger catastrophic fires through ruptured gas lines, electrical short circuits and other secondary hazards.

Dhaka’s overhead power lines form a tangled web across its skyline, while gas and water pipelines run beneath congested streets that were never designed with seismic risks in mind; a combination that can turn three basic utilities into three separate fire hazards. Mohammad Abu Sadeque, former vice-president of the Bangladesh Earthquake Society and executive director of the Centre for Housing and Building Research, explains that fires after a quake typically start from electrical faults, worsen if gas stoves are in use at the time, and spread rapidly once ruptured pipelines feed the flames with leaking gas. Damaged water lines could further make it difficult for firefighters to respond effectively. In January 2024, Japan’s Noto Peninsula earthquake ignited fires, one of which burned the popular Wajima Asaichi morning market to the ground. If a country as seismically prepared as Japan can still lose a historic site to post-quake fire, Dhaka, with its older infrastructure and denser population, has far less room for complacency.

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It is commendable that the fire service has trained tens of thousands of volunteers and kept a special rescue team on standby in case local stations become inoperable after a quake. But preparation to respond after a fire starts is not the same as preventing it from starting at all.

According to the experts in the report, the solutions are not complicated or even too expensive. The basic idea is simple; fit a building’s electricity, gas, and water lines with devices that shut them off automatically the moment an earthquake starts. This works because of how earthquakes actually move through the ground; a weaker first wave arrives before the stronger, more destructive one, giving these devices a few seconds’ warning to cut the supply before real damage begins. Bangladesh already has a version of this plan, drawn up by BUET researchers in 2015, which called for gas to be cut off within just 15 seconds of a strong tremor. Unfortunately, it has sat unused ever since.

Titas Gas has identified two ways to make this happen; controlling valves remotely from a central office, or fitting each valve with its own sensor so it shuts off on its own. Neither exists today. The company says it is considering the technology but has not adopted it, because every main station valve across the network is currently manual and would need to be replaced, at what it describes as significant cost. Currently, the only place this safety feature actually exists is in prepaid smart meters.

None of this requires new invention, but funding and a strong political will. We urge the government to make automatic shut-off systems mandatory for Titas Gas and other utility providers, with a fixed timeline for replacing manual valves. Structural inspections must also be extended to the buildings we can least afford to lose in a disaster such as hospitals, fire stations, and power stations. We have already seen major damage caused in November of last year when a 5.7-magnitude quake centred near Narsingdi killed at least 10 people, injured close to 630, damaged an estimated 300 buildings in Dhaka alone, and knocked out seven power stations. We cannot afford to keep treating the next one as a distant possibility.