From the outbox of Meyer’s inbox:
Way too much tragedy coming out of Haiti in the aftermath of the huge earthquake. If there is one glimmer of good news it is that by following the standards of American engineering and construction, buildings can actually withstand the abuse heaped upon them with a natural disaster like a 6.9 earthquake. Just proves how important it is to do things the right way; especially when it comes to building construction.
Engineers Urge Overhaul of Haiti’s Archaic Building Practices by Jacqueline Charles and Curtis Morgan writing for the Miami Herald.
PORT-AU-PRINCE — A new hospital in the Turgeau neighborhood dissolved into a pancaked stack of concrete floor slabs surrounded by broken toilets. The shell of a nearby high school rested atop its crumbled first floor.
But just across Avenue Jean Paul II, a gleaming aluminum-and-glass skyscraper escaped almost unscathed.
Digicel’s headquarters, the tallest building in Haiti completed a little more than a year ago by the country’s largest phone company, stands out even more than it did before a powerful 7.0 earthquake left much of this city in ruins. A First World tower in a Third World city, it was designed using American building codes to endure 7.2 shock waves or higher. It did.
“You don’t call the structural engineer in at the end of your drawing. You start with the structural engineer before it’s built,’ said architect Christian Dutour, pleased after surveying his 12-story building. “Otherwise, it doesn’t work.”
In a way, that also explains why so many other structures in its shadow collapsed.
Most buildings in Haiti go up without engineers, standards or inspections. The earthquake is only the latest, and worst, tragedy to expose the largely unregulated and slapdash construction long accepted on the island — practices that structural engineers believe added to a staggering death toll that could reach 200,000.
While extensive death and destruction would be expected from a 7.0 temblor so close to a densely populated and dirt-poor city, earthquake experts have nonetheless been shocked by the catastrophic failure of so many prominent and critical buildings.
It wasn’t just humble shacks and turn-of-the-previous-century icons like the historic Roman Catholic Cathedral of Port-au-Prince, but new and newly renovated schools, police stations, bank branches, high-end hotels and hospitals. The U.S. Agency for International Development reported Thursday that 13 of 15 government ministry buildings had been destroyed.
To read the rest of the story and watch the companion video, go here.
