Fairing Earthquakes: Haiti vs. Chile

First of all, let me state that in no way am I an expert in either building technology nor natural disasters. As a student though, I am surrounded by academia that deal with these situations in an idealistic way and shoot for perfection. Therefore, they present ideas that in reality would save lives, if not for the shackles of bureaucracy and money.

Also, before you read this post, I urge you to give whatever you can to the relief effort in Haiti; namely, NGOs organized to respond to physical and economic infrastructure reconfiguration (the people trying to get kids back into schools, hospitals functioning, and roofs over heads).

Everyone has seen the images and heard the statistics. The Haiti earthquake was one of the worst disasters most of us have seen in our lifetimes in terms of actual destruction and death rates. Many people wonder, though, what the difference was between Haiti and Chile, and why a more powerful earthquake in Chile caused astoundingly less destruction.

The answer falls on how we construct our built environment. As John D Sutter explained in his article for CNN In Search of an Earthquake Proof Building, "The technology exists to make buildings nearly earthquake-proof today. However, installing those safer buildings all over the world isn't so simple. Neither is figuring out who will pay."

In my Urban Policy class this week, I was given a first hand account of the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake from a Haitian-American city planning professor, Harley Etienne, who was asked to travel to Haiti and assess both physical and social damage caused by the quake. Aside from an insurmountable assemblage of horror stories and tough-to-look-at pictures, he gave us the straightforward answer as to why this happened.

The answer falls on the fact that Haiti has no building codes to speak of. Though it falls directly on a major fault line that lies under various Caribbean islands, it had no earthquake ready buildings aside from a few major projects built recently by outside developers. The two most hurtful problems came down to two things that fit in your hand: sand and steel.

The concrete that Haiti has been using for years is filled with sand. Sand, while a cheap way to supplant the aggregate material needed to make concrete, has a high concentration of salt, and therefore erodes the rebar laid within it over time.

Secondly, the steel rebar that was used in many of these buildings was smooth. The standard in the US, and the general standard across the globe, logically, is to use ribbed rebar instead of smooth; ribbed performs much better under stress the same way a screw performs much betters than a nail.

Unfortunately, Professor Etienne showed pictures of piles of sand on the side of the road, ready to be filled into more concrete; pictures of men hitting rubble laid with steel with sledgehammers, trying to remove the smooth rebar and sell it to reconstruction efforts. To prepare for the next earthquake, as Etienne and his colleagues show, Haiti must understand the importance of building codes and earthquake proof building technologies. These, of course, cost money and manpower, both of which Haiti is unreasonably short on.

In the US, we have a greater knowledge and appreciation for these types of technologies. Many buildings in earthquake prone zones, San Francisco for example, are built on a sort of rubber pad that takes most of the lateral forces jabbed at the building from the earthquake. The Golden Gate Bridge even is taking in these technologies. The earthquake shakes the foundation of the building, jiggles a rubbery plinth under the building, and the building feels little to nothing but a shake from the rubber.

Haiti is at a tipping point; unfortunately, it had to come at the price of their largest city and many of its inhabitants. Without a doubt, Haiti will reform its building policies and codes requirements to adapt their building practices to their environment. Hopefully it will come faster than the next quake.