We don’t have GHC10,000 to buy equipment to assess earth tremor – GSD

The Geological Survey Department (GSD) says it does not have enough funds to readily to undertake an assessment on the back of recent earth tremors that have hit parts of Accra.

Speaking in an interview on Onua FM’s Yen Sempa following the Saturday’s night tremor, Seismologist at the Geological Survey Department, Nicholas Opoku said the GSD needs an amount of GHC10,000 to purchase the necessary equipment to conduct an assessment of the tremor.

In the past few months, there have been a number of earth tremors experienced in parts of Accra, and this has led to many raising questions and calling on the GSD to assess the situation and put measures in place to avert any disastrous eventuality.

But Nicholas Opoku said, “We don’t have contingency funds or budget for this so we are going to talk to our heads to see if we can get some funds to do the assessments”.

Mr. Opoku said the GSD needs to carry out an infrastructural assessment because the tremors “can weaken buildings and properties in the affected areas.”

Within seconds, Saturday’s earth tremor which was recorded at about 11:30pm rippled through Kasoa, Weija and McCarthy areas, Ablekuma, Madina, Christian Village, Oyarifa, North Kaneshie, Sowutuom, Abelemkpe, and Legon among other surrounding areas.

Lack of logistics

Mr. Opoku said the Department lacks logistics to perform its duties else, assessments like this would not have been a problem for the service.

“If we had infrastructural monitoring equipment, it should have been easy because the equipment should have transferred the data unto our system directory”, he explained.

“If we were well resourced, we could have done these easily”, he added.

High rise buildings

Mr. Opoku urged those who put up high rise buildings to endeavor to purchase gadgets that can be used to measure magnitudes of earth tremors.

“The cost of building and the cost of buying these equipment for these tall building to respond to the ground shaking is peanut when you compare buying these equipment to putting up these buildings”, he explained.