Engineer: "This was not an earthquake disaster"
The audience at last Tuesday’s UC Berkeley lecture given by Eduardo Fierro, one of the first U.S. earthquake engineers to visit post-quake Haiti, collectively cringed as Fierro showed slide after slide of haphazard columns, brittle frames, and slipshod rods and joints. “This was not an earthquake disaster,” Fierro said. “[This] was caused by people that didn’t know how to use codes, that built things in bad shape. These were the people that caused the tragedy.”
Fierro, a Peruvian native who has worked around the Pacific rim, arrived in Haiti within two days of the earthquake to investigate the destruction caused to the country’s built environment. From Port Au Prince to smaller cities like Leogane, from cathedrals to schools to power plants, Fierro found that the same architectural mistakes were made over and over again:
- Heavy, unsupported block walls: One of the main principles of architecture, Fierro said, is to make structures as light as possible. “These people don’t know that,” Fierro said. He showed multiple slides of houses and buildings constructed with unwieldy slabs of concrete and cinder blocks.
- Poor detailing: Fierro pointed out badly made plastic hinges, as well as joints going against “all the rules for earthquake engineering” with small, smooth bars and no hoops.
- Lack of rebars: One of Fierro’s most troubling observations. Steel reinforcement bars—rebars—are what hold up concrete and masonry structures. Most of the collapsed buildings’ rebar was either entirely too frail and thin to support the building—if the building had rebar at all.
- Poorly constructed columns: Columns holding up higher floors were often unreinforced concrete, too brittle to provide sufficient support.
- Bad concrete: Even the Presidential Palace was built using poorly compacted concrete. Also, many buildings had corroded columns, which suggests that beach sands (which retain more moisture than river sands) were used to mix concrete.
- Bad soil: Areas with the most damage were built on top of soft soil.
Fierro concluded the seminar with photographs of local reconstructive efforts currently taking place. Things don’t look much better—new construction is proceeding the same way as before the quake. “Same little columns, same blocks, same lack of rebars,” Fierro said.
But what’s the solution? “Better code and better design isn’t the answer,” Fierro said. He stressed that the rebuilding process must be simple and supervised. One idea: distributing a “cartoonish” booklet depicting the right construction processes – a guide so easy to understand you “don’t have to be an engineer” to read it.