$500 million on a temporary solution

Our Chief Operations Officer took this photo in Haiti today. “T-shelters” or “transitional shelters” are a popular solution in post-disaster situations. They’re built to withstand earthquakes and hurricanes, to keep residents from being displaced again. They are expensive and subtract funds which could be used for retrofitting damaged homes or rebuilding homes. A family is living in this t-shelter, which is three years old now and clearly deteriorating.

By some estimates, the [2010 earthquake in Haiti] killed 200,000 people and made 1.3 million homeless overnight by destroying or damaging 172,000 homes or apartments.

Retrofit evaluations in Haiti

Our staff is still evaluating houses for retrofit in Port-au-Prince. We’re currently doing evaluations in Kanpèch. These evaluations help us determine what interventions a structure needs in order to be earthquake-resistant.

 

Bad construction practice is everywhere

Look at the top of the wall. The decision to lay the top course of blocks on its side for extra ventilation was an extremely bad one, making it so the seismic load in the roof slab has no competent load path to the shear wall below. In the retrofit evaluation our engineers give this wall no credit for seismic resistance–it will have to be fixed.

What’s wrong with this picture?

By Gordon Goodell, Build Change Chief Operations Officer
Feb. 27, 2014

Years before I came to Build Change I worked on a mountain rescue team. The first rule for rescue is “My safety, and the safety of my team.” At Build Change we work to limit our risk to the extent possible by ensuring that all buildings we use are seismically safe.

By the nature of what we do,

Is it safe to build houses from straw, tires, or plastic bottles?

Sure, if they’re designed and built to be safe in earthquakes

At Build Change we mostly teach people to build masonry houses or timber houses. We do not use plastic bottles, tires, straw bales, earth bags, or any number of other approaches which have been touted as environmentally-friendly, cost-effective methods to rebuild devastated areas.

Why? What’s wrong with homes made from waste materials? Or plastic bottle houses? Or straw bale houses?

Why don’t we use premade homes?

The problem we have at Build Change is that the destruction in the wake of major natural disasters is so huge and the need to rebuild is so great, that we don’t have enough hands to rebuild it all. Teaching local people how to build an entirely new, unfamiliar structural system, whether it is earthships, plastic bottle homes, or precast concrete panels, adds unnecessary work to an already enormous task. Instead, we choose to work within the systems and designs the local builders already know and use.