Poor design, poor construction in Haiti

Citation

Ritchie, L. (2010), "Poor design, poor construction in Haiti", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 19 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/dpm.2010.07319dab.001

Poor design, poor construction in Haiti

Article Type: News items From: Disaster Prevention and Management, Volume 19, Issue 4

Poverty and density led to devastation

Haiti’s buildings were particularly vulnerable to damage from the recent 7.0 magnitude earthquake because of a lack of attention to earthquake hazards in design and construction, and poor construction practices, according to a joint February 18, 2010 US Geological Survey and Earthquake Engineering Research Institute Reconnaissance Team Report (tinyurl.com/yl7gtwb).

The five-member team studied buildings in Port-au-Prince and communities to the west of the city between January 26 and February 3, 2010:

A damage survey of 107 buildings in downtown Port-au-Prince indicated that 28 percent had collapsed and another 33 percent were damaged enough to require repairs. A similar survey of 52 buildings in Léogâne found that 62 percent had collapsed and another 31 percent required repairs, the report said.

One member of the team, University of Washington civil and environmental engineering Professor Marc Eberhard was quoted in a news release saying, “Usually when I go to earthquakes, I find that the amount of damage is less than what appears on the television, In this case it was much more.” The poverty of the people combined with the density of population and lack of building codes resulted in the widespread devastation, he said.

According to the USGS/EERI report, “Reinforced concrete frames with concrete block masonry infill appeared to perform particularly poorly.” Patrick Paultre, a Haitian architect who now teaches at Canada’s University of Sherbrooke, agreed. Paultre said in an interview:

One big, big problem in Haiti is all of the slabs of the buildings are made by putting concrete blocks in the slabs to reduce the amount of concrete you would pour. These blocks are just hanging there and retained by the concrete around them. A little shaking and they will fall off. Just one will kill a person. You might have forty or fifty of them in a room. That’s a major problem.

The USGS/EERI report added:

Structures with light (timber or sheet metal) roofs performed better compared with structures with concrete roofs and slabs. The seismic performance of some buildings was adequate, and some of the damaged buildings appeared to have had low deformation demands. These observations suggest that structures designed and constructed with adequate stiffness and reinforcing details would have resisted the earthquake without being damaged severely.

In another assessment of damage from the Haiti quake, teams of scientists from around the world have examined very high-resolution aerial imagery of the earthquake region to learn how many buildings have collapsed or are heavily damaged. This new initiative is called operation Global Earth Observation Catastrophe Assessment Network (GEO-CAN). It is being coordinated world wide by ImageCat, Inc. in Los Angeles and its London-based operation, ImageCat Ltd According to ImageCat’s description of the process:

An area of some 300 square kilometers has been divided up into squares, and numbers of squares allocated for damage assessment to each GEO-CAN expert. The aerial imagery they are studying shows high resolution images of houses, public buildings, cars, and vegetation with detail that even shows the folds in tents in the temporary encampments. (This is compared to imagery taken before the earthquake and buildings that have collapsed, or are heavily damaged are mapped).

The results will be used to inform the reconstruction program in Haiti (extracted from Natural Hazards Observer, May 2010).