KVPT’s Patan Darbar Earthquake Response Campaign - Work to Date - September 2016

Notes on Post-Earthquake Approval
Processes, Guidelines and Manual
Erich Theophile
The Approval Processes
With numerous post-earthquake rebuilding project applications
under review, the Kathmandu Valley Preservation
Trust could be considered one of the “first cars
in the train” attempting to start actual rebuilding work
requiring the consensus of the Department of Archaeology
(DoA) and the newly-active National Reconstruction
Authority (NRA). The process is painfully slow,
and KVPT is fortunate to have a number of rescue and
repair operations underway at Patan Darbar to keep our
staff and work crews busy. The greatest challenges are
the technical details of seismic strengthening related to
the use of modern materials like steel and reinforced
concrete. As additional actors and agencies come on the
scene to work in 2017, all proposing the industry standards
of reinforced concrete and steel reinforcements to
complement historical structures, it it conceivable that
these questions will become less controversial.
When one considers the potential for additional actors
and agencies on the scene, is important to point out
that to keep KVPT’s official government status, approximately
two man months of time are required per year
just to follow and chase the official paperwork. In the big
picture, such complexities, paperwork, procedures, and
unintentional obstacles created by the Social Welfare
Council, the Ministry of Culture, and the Department
of Archaeology create a significant amount of overhead
for a small organization. As the bureaucracy tries to increase
the number of actors by tendering bids for outside
private consultants to design and execute conservation/
restoration projects, the necessary overhead costs and
unpredictable delays may eliminate many contenders. It
is hard to make money in the restoring of historic structures
in Nepal—better to do it for love.
Department of Archaeology- Guidelines and
Illustrated Manual
Rohit Ranjitkar was invited to serve on an expert committee
advising the DoA on post-earthquake guidelines
for preservation and was able to enrich the discussion
and the official approved draft (June 2016).
One critical and useful point the new draft explains is
that while traditional materials are desirable, each historic
structure must be examined for its own conditions
and characteristics and may require exceptional measures
for its preservation. (NRA 2016 Guidelines, Section
12b: “Use of Non-traditional Construction Material
and Technology: If in the course of restoration and rebuilding
of a particular monument it is deemed that the
use of traditional construction material and traditional
technology cannot reduce seismic risk from a technical
perspective, non-traditional construction materials and
technology may be used, with prior approval from the
Department of Archaeology, in order to rebuild a fully
collapsed monument, in a manner that the non-traditional
materials are not visible from outside.”)
As the only member on that committee with extensive
hands-on experience on historic buildings, and with a library
of KVPT’s architectural solutions, Ranjitkar developed
and contributed the illustrated manual (Appendix
I, following these notes) which was adopted by the DoA,
to share KVPT’s techniques for seismic strengthening.
KVPT furthermore commissioned and supported the
following professional translation of the Guidelines into
English from Nepali (Appendix II), in order to open up
discussion and review.
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