Abstract:
At 8:52 am on 8th October 2005, Margalla Towers, the plush, high rise
apartment complex in the heart of Islamabad came down within seconds due to a
catastrophic earthquake, killing 74 people, rendering 148 homeless and destroying the
lives of thousands forever. Like everything else, the story of Margalla Towers has all
the great ingredients. Greed, dishonesty, negligence, corruption, indifference, falsehood and the list goes on and on. The history sheet of Margalla Towers reads like
a criminal record, yet nothing seems to move those who have a great deal of power to
rectify the great harm done to so many innocent people. There is convincing evidence
that the Margalla Towers were absolutely unfit to be inhabited and that complaints
about its shoddy structure were raised as early as 1993, just two years after the project
was first made public by the CDA. The residents who petitioned CDA about the
faulty towers were simply ignored. Photographic evidence was dismissed. Floors were
added without proper structural support and a building which was flawed in design, built with substandard materials and in gross violation of laid down minimum
standards was allowed to go up and even given a satisfactory completion certification
by the CDA, the independent consultants who raised alarm bells 12 years before the
towers collapsed were simply removed by the CDA and told to take a hike yet its fall
only raised clouds of dust and the wails of distressed families. This thesis aims to find
the faults in the architectural and structural designing and construction of the Margalla
Towers in the light of the engineering studies that ultimately resulted in its collapse.
