Home & Garden
Earthquake-Resistant Design is Not New to Haiti
- Wednesday, May 25, 2011 2:05 PM
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - One kind of house remained standing in the hills around Port-au-Prince after the earthquake. Pierre Fouche, a Haitian earthquake engineer, noticed that these houses stood among the rubble of neighboring buildings that had collapsed.
They are the “gingerbread houses,” the wooden and quaintly designed homes latticed with diagonal planks on the outside walls.
The material – wood – and the triangular latticework were the right combination for earthquake resistance, Fouche told E4C. The lattice provided strength to withstand the lateral loads that a quake exerts. And when wood collapses, it's not as dangerous as falling bricks or concrete, he said.
So, Haitians already know how to build one kind of earthquake-resistant house. And construction crews there can learn new techniques to make all the buildings safer, says Fouche, who's completing a graduate course in engineering at the University of Buffalo in New York. He wants to show them how.
A concrete problem
He suggests that folk-architectural styles like the gingerbread houses could become the norm in Haiti. Reinforced concrete is also a viable material and one that Haitians use widely, he says. But new buildings should get some tweaks. Shear walls, for example, the walls braced to bear lateral loads.
And the concrete should be properly mixed. What's used in many buildings is sub-par, Fouche says. Also, it's not reinforced with enough rebar, and the bars that are used are smooth, rather than ribbed, so they don't adhere well to the concrete.
The root of the problem may be a lack of codes and training. “There are no state standards for earthquake-resistant design in the country,” Fouche said. “Very few knew about the exposure of the country to a quake,” so they did little to account for it in building design. He hopes such standards will become law and part of the curriculum at the country's engineering education programs. Link to Full Article, below
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Full Article: Engineering for Change
