On May 3rd, we went with Gen. Ruiz and Ing. Flores into the barricaded area of Manta, the neighborhood of Tarqui. This area had the most damage and was a mix of large to small commercial buildings and hotels, plus multi family and single family houses (some mixed use).
Many of the small and medium sized buildings that had collapsed were already demolished and some were being taken down while we were there.
After Canoa, we next headed north to Jama, another coastal town. In Jama we selected a street in town and compared the building type and performance of each, one-by-one. There were 7 houses, some with commercial space below. Six houses were wood framed, 2-stories, and one was reinforced concrete, 3-stories.
Of the wood framed, 5 had masonry infill at the ground floor and 1 had bamboo lath with plaster overlay at the ground floor.
This morning we met with Ing. Hermel Flores, owner of Hermel Flores Construcciones and former chair of the Ecuatorian Chamber of Construction, and General Florencio Ruiz Prado, Director of Citizen Security for Manta, in Manta. We discussed our activities, the situation and the presentation they coordinated for us to give on Tuesday and Wednesday, in Manta and Portoviejo, respectively.
Ing. Flores traveled with us next up north towards the epicenter. The coast of Ecuador is in the highest seismic zone of the country.
May 1st was our first full day in Ecuador, after landing in Guayaquil on April 30. Our team has three members: Traveling from our Bogota office there is Juan Caballero, architect and Director of Programs and Partnerships for Latin American, and Walter Cano, structural engineer and Project Engineer for Colombia. From the U.S./headquarters there is Lizzie Blaisdell, structural engineer and Director of Engineering.
In Guayaquil, we saw little evidence of an earthquake. According to the preliminary report on the Instituto Geofisico website (http://www.igepn.edu.ec/) a strong motion sensor near Guayaquil,