People's risk perception in earthquake prone Quetta city of Baluchistan

Large parts of Pakistan lie within a seismically active Himalayan belt. The experts suspect that in the next century, damages from earthquakes would be unprecedented. The objective of this paper is to examine the perception of people living with earthquake risks in Quetta, using key informant interviews, community group discussions and structured household survey. The survey has been conducted among 200 households, applying the simple random sampling method. The study explored the relationship among different variables including socio-economic status of the respondents using multivariate statistics. The results revealed that earthquake risk perception associates significantly with the people's age, income, education etc. Further, the perception of earthquake risk varies among different governmental and non-governmental organizations and community members. The survey results also reveal that people know the risks posed by earthquakes but have fatalistic attitudes towards the future predictions of the earthquakes. The paper recommends programs and projects to create public awareness and preparedness for risk reduction.