goILOILO.com

Travels and personal perspectives on Iloilo and Panay Island

Haiti Earthquake – lessons for the Philippines?

Tectonics And Poor Construction Conspired To Create Devastation In Haiti – Latimes.Com
The catastrophic quake that struck Haiti on Tuesday involved a collision of lethal circumstances: a massive, shallow eruption below a densely populated city with few, if any, building codes.
The magnitude 7.0 quake occurred near the boundary between two major tectonic plates, the Caribbean and North American plates.
Most of the movement along these plates is what is known as left-lateral strike-slip motion, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, with the Caribbean plate moving eastward in relation to the North America plate.
Kate Hutton, a seismologist at Caltech, said the quake was similar to those seen along the San Andreas fault: It was shallow, a fact that enhances the intensity and makes it more localized to the region right along the fault.
“We are not surprised by any of it,” Hutton said.
The Haiti quake had many similarities to the 1989 Loma Prieta quake in Northern California. That quake, said Tom Heaton, director of Caltech’s Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory, “caused a lot of damage, but it wasn’t a disaster like this in terms of the number of people injured and killed.”
For engineers and others well versed in the strict guidelines that California, Japan and other quake-prone zones mandate, the devastation seen in Haiti — and other developing countries that have been hit by similarly sized temblors — is horrifying but understandable. They blame the high numbers of earthquake fatalities in developing countries on poor building construction and rapid urban growth.
Before about 1950, a given-sized earthquake would do about the same amount of damage in the developed and underdeveloped world, said Ross Stein, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif. Now the loss of life is typically 10 times higher in developing countries and the damage can be as much as 100 times higher, he said.
When a magnitude 7.9 earthquake rocked China’s Sichuan province in 2008, schools, hospitals and other public buildings collapsed, contributing to the huge toll — about 87,000 dead and missing. Shoddy school construction was blamed for the deaths of about 5,000 children.
The Chinese government was criticized for failing to impose strict building regulations, which it pledged to remedy.
Farzad Naeim, president of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, said that the quake in Haiti demonstrates “the same bad history, the nightmare, being repeated over and over again.”
Naeim said that older construction in the region was built at a time when “people didn’t know better.” And new construction, he said, has not kept pace with advances in earthquake engineering, including reinforcements that are standard for new construction in California.
Turkey had a “very advanced code” in 1999 when a magnitude 7.4 earthquake killed at least 17,000 people, said Stein, who has worked extensively in the country. But the government left it to contractors to do their own inspections, he said.
In a city like Istanbul, “you are not really going to get anywhere by making rules,” he said. “Many, many people are just pouring into the area without anything, and they knock down some trees and put a tent up. And the next year it’s a shack. And the next year it’s kind of a building. And the next year they start adding a floor as their family grows or other relatives come into the area.
“So here I am worrying about construction standards, but in reality so many of the buildings are built without any ownership, without any architect or engineer or anything,” Stein said.
“What you have to do is train people to build stronger buildings with the means at their disposal.”
Brian Tucker heads a Palo Alto-based group, GeoHazards International, that works with communities in developing countries to do just that. But he said that people “tend to treat earthquake disasters as God-given and controlled by God,” especially in countries with many other pressing problems.
“I try to respectfully tell people that the earthquake disaster is in our hands,” he said. “It’s not like a comet coming from out of space that you have no way of anticipating.”
Stein, of the USGS, said that part of the problem is that scientists have spent much of their time trying to understand the earthquake risks in California, Japan and other well-off parts of the world with high seismic hazards, while ignoring poorer and more densely populated parts of the world.
That’s why the United Nations Development Program and other international agencies have been helping vulnerable countries — including Jordan, Bhutan, China, Fiji, India and Iran — to improve planning for earthquakes. The U.N. advises governments to upgrade schools, hospitals and other public buildings to better withstand earthquakes; to impose stricter building codes; and to develop evacuation, rescue and contingency plans.
Jordan Ryan, director of the UNDP crisis bureau, said his agency estimates that 60 million people have been affected by quakes in the last 10 years.
Ryan said there had been progress in getting the issue onto the agenda of some governments. “It’s a very difficult argument to make,” he said.
“It’s like the old insurance argument: ‘Who cares about prevention? We don’t have enough money. We’re a poor country.’ “

Haiti-EarthquakeThe Haiti earthquake comes as we have just finalized plans for our new house in Tigbauan, Iloilo in the Philippines.  Looking at the photos from Haiti, one sees construction that has much in common with that in the Philippines — reinforced concrete beams and columns with a soft block infill.  I have been concerned about some building practices I see in the Philippines; cement blocks that are mostly sand — so soft they can be crushed in ones hand, unwashed sand and gravel from rivers, soupy concrete with far too much water mixed by hand and used for support columns, concrete which starts to set but is revived with even more water so it “won’t go to waste”.   Comments I read about problems in Haiti seem so similar:

“There are also significant problems with the quality of building materials used, says Peter Haas, head of the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, a US-based non-profit group that has been working in Haiti since 2006.

“People are skimping on cement to try to cut costs, putting a lot of water in, building too thin, and you end up with a structure that’s innately weaker,” said Mr Haas, who was on his way to Haiti to help assess the safety of damaged buildings.

“Concrete blocks are being made in people’s backyards and dried out in the sun,” he said.”

Roger Bilham writing in Nature says, “In my visit to the region in the weeks after the earthquake, the reason for the disaster was clear in the mangled ruins — the buildings had been doomed during their construction. Every possible mistake was evident: brittle steel, coarse non-angular aggregate, weak cement mixed with dirty or salty sand, and the widespread termination of steel reinforcement rods at the joints between columns and floors of buildings where earthquake stresses are highest.”

One writer called these buildings, “rubble in waiting”.

In my own experience with building in the Philippines, non-angular dirty aggregate and dirty sand dredged from rivers is in very common use in Iloilo.

Also this from the Los Angeles Times:

Tectonics And Poor Construction Conspired To Create Devastation In Haiti – Latimes.Com

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-me-quake-science14-2010jan14,0,1587916.story

The catastrophic quake that struck Haiti on Tuesday involved a collision of lethal circumstances: a massive, shallow eruption below a densely populated city with few, if any, building codes.

The magnitude 7.0 quake occurred near the boundary between two major tectonic plates, the Caribbean and North American plates.

Most of the movement along these plates is what is known as left-lateral strike-slip motion, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, with the Caribbean plate moving eastward in relation to the North America plate.

Kate Hutton, a seismologist at Caltech, said the quake was similar to those seen along the San Andreas fault: It was shallow, a fact that enhances the intensity and makes it more localized to the region right along the fault.

“We are not surprised by any of it,” Hutton said.

The Haiti quake had many similarities to the 1989 Loma Prieta quake in Northern California. That quake, said Tom Heaton, director of Caltech’s Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory, “caused a lot of damage, but it wasn’t a disaster like this in terms of the number of people injured and killed.”

For engineers and others well versed in the strict guidelines that California, Japan and other quake-prone zones mandate, the devastation seen in Haiti — and other developing countries that have been hit by similarly sized temblors — is horrifying but understandable. They blame the high numbers of earthquake fatalities in developing countries on poor building construction and rapid urban growth.

Before about 1950, a given-sized earthquake would do about the same amount of damage in the developed and underdeveloped world, said Ross Stein, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif. Now the loss of life is typically 10 times higher in developing countries and the damage can be as much as 100 times higher, he said.

When a magnitude 7.9 earthquake rocked China’s Sichuan province in 2008, schools, hospitals and other public buildings collapsed, contributing to the huge toll — about 87,000 dead and missing. Shoddy school construction was blamed for the deaths of about 5,000 children.

The Chinese government was criticized for failing to impose strict building regulations, which it pledged to remedy.

Farzad Naeim, president of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, said that the quake in Haiti demonstrates “the same bad history, the nightmare, being repeated over and over again.”

Naeim said that older construction in the region was built at a time when “people didn’t know better.” And new construction, he said, has not kept pace with advances in earthquake engineering, including reinforcements that are standard for new construction in California.

Turkey had a “very advanced code” in 1999 when a magnitude 7.4 earthquake killed at least 17,000 people, said Stein, who has worked extensively in the country. But the government left it to contractors to do their own inspections, he said.

In a city like Istanbul, “you are not really going to get anywhere by making rules,” he said. “Many, many people are just pouring into the area without anything, and they knock down some trees and put a tent up. And the next year it’s a shack. And the next year it’s kind of a building. And the next year they start adding a floor as their family grows or other relatives come into the area.

“So here I am worrying about construction standards, but in reality so many of the buildings are built without any ownership, without any architect or engineer or anything,” Stein said.

“What you have to do is train people to build stronger buildings with the means at their disposal.”

Brian Tucker heads a Palo Alto-based group, GeoHazards International, that works with communities in developing countries to do just that. But he said that people “tend to treat earthquake disasters as God-given and controlled by God,” especially in countries with many other pressing problems.

“I try to respectfully tell people that the earthquake disaster is in our hands,” he said. “It’s not like a comet coming from out of space that you have no way of anticipating.”

Stein, of the USGS, said that part of the problem is that scientists have spent much of their time trying to understand the earthquake risks in California, Japan and other well-off parts of the world with high seismic hazards, while ignoring poorer and more densely populated parts of the world.

That’s why the United Nations Development Program and other international agencies have been helping vulnerable countries — including Jordan, Bhutan, China, Fiji, India and Iran — to improve planning for earthquakes. The U.N. advises governments to upgrade schools, hospitals and other public buildings to better withstand earthquakes; to impose stricter building codes; and to develop evacuation, rescue and contingency plans.

Jordan Ryan, director of the UNDP crisis bureau, said his agency estimates that 60 million people have been affected by quakes in the last 10 years.

Ryan said there had been progress in getting the issue onto the agenda of some governments. “It’s a very difficult argument to make,” he said.

“It’s like the old insurance argument: ‘Who cares about prevention? We don’t have enough money. We’re a poor country.’ ”

More reading:

Flawed Building Likely a Big Element – New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/world/americas/14construction.html?scp=4&sq=construction&st=cse

Haiti’s Buildings Weren’t Fit To Withstand Quakes NPR

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122547242

Related Posts
    Our Philippine House Project: Construction Quality – Philippines
    Our Philippine House Project: Rebar Splicing
    Is Iloilo Flooding a Result of Global Warming?
    Building our Philippine House – Index
    Our Philippine house project: layout, footers and columns
    Digging our water well in Tigbauan, Philippines
    Our House Project: Architects and Builders
    Our Philippine house project – equipment shopping
    Sewerage/Septic/Drainage Systems in the Philippines
    Medicare for Expats in the Philippines

Posted by GOIloilo on 01.18.10 12:37AM under Our House Project

Read Comments

  1. Posted by Manok on 01.20.10 2:11 am

    The quality of the hollow blocks doesn’t really matter: the house is fully supported by the columns and beams. The blocks are mostly for filling the spaces inbetween. Even good quality blocks couldn’t hold the load of a house if a beam would collapse.

    But contracting the construction out, yes, that’s the most certain way to get a skimpy/limpy house.

    Haven’t felt any of those small quakes here in years… maybe a big one is building up…

  2. Posted by Building our Philippine House – Index at goILOILO.com on 02.27.10 6:18 am

    [...] Our Philippine house: Concrete Columns Our Philippine house: Roof Beams Our Philippine house: Earthquakes – Lessons from Haiti Our Philippine house: Building roof trusses – welding Our Philippine house: Installing roof [...]

Post Comments




XHTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

* Required. Your email will never be displayed in public.