Gorgan, September 12, 2007 - A national workshop on emergency response planning, supported by UNDP and Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre (ADPC), concluded its work in the northern city of Gorgan on Wednesday.

In partnership with Thailand-based ADPC and Nepal’s National Society for Earthquake Technology, UNDP is supporting the government in organizing a series of thematic workshops aimed to build national capacities in areas such as school safety, medical infrastructure safety, city response and preparedness plans, re-enforcing building permit processes, community-based disaster risk management, as well as public awareness on disaster risk. Nine such workshops have been successfully held so far, with about 400 masons and experts participating.

The five-day workshop in Gorgan and a similar workshop held earlier on 2-6 September in the other pilot city of Kerman –both disaster-prone areas, were organized under the Five-year National Joint Programme of Government-UNDP for Strengthening Capacities for Disaster Risk Management. “The programme lays a lot of emphasis on strategic planning of disaster risk management programs,” said UN Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident Representative Knut Ostby, adding, “To this end, a pilot earthquake risk management programme has been initiated in two demonstration cities, Gorgan and Kerman, and we aim to encourage the government to replicate it to other cities across Iran.

The demonstration exercise will ultimately be combined with a process of creating benchmarks leading to standardisation and regulation of building codes across the country”. Under the five-year programme, an electronic disaster risk portal and a national disaster database for the country are being developed. Initial steps for developing a disaster risk report for Iran have been taken, which would identify, among others, mechanisms to develop, host and execute it. In addition, a sub-regional website is under completion. The programme now has three running offices located in Tehran, Gorgan, and Kerman. “A lot has been done so far in the area of awareness raising,” noted UNDP Programme Analyst Victoria Kianpour. “ This includes wide dissemination of posters among engineers, contractors, and builders showing the gaps in the earthquake resiliency of buildings; initiating production of an animated movie on the same subject for television broadcasting, printing and dissemination of an Earthquake Weekly newsletter in the city of Gorgan”, she added. Working groups are now active in Gorgan and Kerman, and have prepared a work plan for implementing disaster risk management in the focus areas. The school safety programme has been implemented in 16 schools in Kerman and Gorgan, and benchmarks are being captured, and work plans for other areas are being developed by the working groups, with UNDP technical support.

A consultant is recruited, and is working with over 40 partners in order to establish a national information portal that will be run by trained national partners. Iran lies on a major seismic line and has been a regular victim of quakes, some of them of catastrophic proportions. Some 30,000 people were killed and thousands more were injured on 26 December 2003 when the 6.5 magnitude quake razed the ancient Silk Road city of Bam, rendering some 200,000 people homeless and damaging or destroying some 45,000 houses.