Haiti in the long-term

Citation

(2010), "Haiti in the long-term", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 19 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/dpm.2010.07319cab.002

Haiti in the long-term

Article Type: News items From: Disaster Prevention and Management, Volume 19, Issue 3

The emphasis in Haiti after the earthquake will turn to the long-term recovery of the country. Helen Clark, administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, told the January Montreal Ministerial Conference, “We need to plan carefully, but expeditiously, a sequence of essential steps involved in developing the earthquake recovery program in Haiti. For any such large-scale recovery program to succeed, it will take the sustained and enduring commitment of the international community as a whole to support the government and people of Haiti, over a realistic time frame that will stretch well beyond the next three or four years”. A magnitude 7.0 quake struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, killing an estimated 230,000 people. The question now is what long-term planning and assistance will consist of. There’s no question a lot is needed. One of the world’s poorest people, Haitians have been failed by their government and the economy as well as their geology and their buildings. Of Haitians, 55 percent live on less than $1.25 a day. A total of 58 percent are undernourished. The gross domestic product of the country shrank at an annual rate of 2.1 percent between 1990 and 2007, according to UNICEF statistics. “I think that the challenge with Haiti is that it is going to be a very poor and vulnerable country for a long, long time”, says Dan Erikson, director of Caribbean programs at Inter-American Dialogue, a research and policy group on western hemisphere issues. “Any notion of thoroughly revising building codes or urban planning or installing early warning systems in Haiti probably aren’t realistic. This is a country with a very limited infrastructure and highly overpopulated urban areas.

“The international community and the Haitian government need to look at relatively low-cost, short-term fixes, because those are the changes that are most likely to be achieved”, Erikson says.

A long list

The list of things that Haiti needs is long. Erikson says that priorities should go into reducing crowding in Port-au-Prince, and improving communications. “Other big issues have been food and water. They could safeguard the central drinking water system of Port Au Prince to make it more hurricane and earthquake proof”, he says. “They have to focus on the four or five or six things that necessary to resist a national disaster - water, a food supply, electricity, and access to the outside world. The airport is overburdened. The port was barely functional even before the earthquake, and now that’s been damaged further.

There should be multiple airports and multiple ports so you don’t have this problem. The failure of Haiti’s government has been as obvious as the failure of the infrastructure. “The Haitian national police need a better way to remain organized in an emergency. Clearly you need to have a way to clear the streets and deal with waste disposal”, Erikson says. “In the broader sense of looking at the social safety net, you need to think in terms of education and health care. They should make sure that they have a system developed where they can set up emergency medical clinics.

“Even though this quake was of tremendous magnitude, the government gives the impression of having no emergency plan. Given the fact that it’s in a known hurricane corridor, it seems like that would be appropriate”, Erikson says. “The biggest challenge in this disaster was the pre-existing situation in Haiti. The capacity of government there was very low”, says Tom Birkland, public policy professor at North Carolina State University. “Haiti is a very poor country. The GDP is four to eight times less than its neighbor, the Dominican Republic. So Haiti was already in very poor shape”. He adds, “What does it mean to recover in Haiti? You don’t want to recover to the same level of vulnerability you had pre-disaster. But in Haiti, people were poor by any number of development standards. They have to recover to better than the status quo. That’s where the challenge is going to be.

“We need to supply food and water, obviously, basic medical care”, Birkland says. “There may be an opportunity to build a community with the kids, working with young people as volunteers. Half of Haiti’s population is below the age of 18”.

Birkland says the US “probably needs to take the lead here, because we’re best equipped to do it”. But the history of US intervention in the country is checkered at best, and many Haitians remain suspicious of US motives, even in a crisis. While the USA has been in a position to offer long-term help in the past, it has failed to do so. In addition, if history is a guide, Haiti will have to install a government that the United States can trust before there is any surge in long-term assistance.

A constant stream of intervention

Stephen Majeski, a political science professor at the University of Washington, says, “Let’s go back historically, roll the tapes back to the early 1900s. Like many Central American and Caribbean countries, Haiti was … a little tiny country, which had a small economic base, largely extractive or agricultural, dependent upon expertise and foreign investment from the USA and European countries. Entrepreneurs moved in and invested money on agriculture and other extractive industries. United Fruit Company, for instance, emerged from this era. “Most of the regimes were relatively incompetent. They lacked the ability to control their countries, lacked the technical expertise to run their economies. They were constantly in trouble economically and politically. This led to US intervention in various forms. In 1915, the US intervened in Haiti. The US was fed up. They finally sent in the Marines. They established a new constitution. An admiral ran the country. Haitian regimes evolved into dictatorships … There’s been a constant stream of intervention from the US So now some of the Haitians are going, ‘What are all these US military doing in our country? We’ve seen this play before’”

Majeski adds, “Haiti we know is one of the poorest countries, with limited infrastructure, an ecological disaster area. We know their economy is very primitive. Yet the amount of economic aid the US has sent to Haiti is quite small relative to other Latin American and Caribbean countries. One reason for this is because US policy makers have been dissatisfied with the political regimes and their ability to run things in Haiti.

“If you look at Haiti, it lacks natural resources … It has no minerals. It has always had terrible educational levels. Developing human capital has always been problematic. Part of this is self-inflicted. There’s been tremendous internal turmoil. Different factions have competed for control over the limited resources. They’ve never had a stable political regime, which have been extractive in themselves”, he says. Long-term priorities for recovery should be raising education levels and restore the ecological infrastructure, he says. “You could build up the human capital, attempt ecological restoration. But one of the reasons Haiti has no trees is that people are poor – they took them for fuel”. But the nation has to get a decent, non-extractive governmental structure, which may only come about through external coercion. “There has to be some sense that there’s a political structure that is stable and that can use the investment resources. There’s not been the will on the part of the US and other in a quasi-coercive fashion to force the Haitians to settle long-term political differences. The UN has had a peacekeeping force there for six or seven years.

They’ve been trying to create political stability and order, to create an environment in which you can move forward on other issues”.

Housing

The most obvious problem from the quake was the collapse of buildings and houses. There has been comment that stricter housing codes are necessary. But without an effective government to enforce them, codes by themselves are unlikely to be effective. What will be necessary is a method of wedding local building customs to earthquake and hurricane-resistant structural techniques.

Richard Clarke, a lecturer on structural engineering at the University of West Indies visited Haiti immediately after the quake to do a “preliminary survey” to assess buildings which had not collapsed as potential locations for temporary medical facilities. He sent a brief memo to the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, in which he summarized his early findings. Clarke wrote, “Interestingly, in many instances of multi-story construction, flat-slab reinforced concrete is the gravity load system. It is also common to find that the floor slabs are of ‘concrete composite’ construction. That is, blocks are used as fillers and permanent formwork, but space is left on either side to facilitate the placement of the rebar. The concrete is then placed with a topping. I am not sure if fabric reinforcement is placed in the topping, or its thickness”. Clarke says – and other experts confirm – that in multi-story buildings the columns were probably too small to withstand the shaking they got from the quake. “It seems that collapse was frequently due to shear failure of these columns, which are generally quite small – no more than 10in. × 10in. Punching shear failure of the floor due to inadequate rebar and/or shear strength of the flat-slab is also probably another failure mode”.

He said that there are structural engineers in Haiti capable of contributing to sound structures. Patrick Paultre, a Haitian architect who teaches at Canada’s University of Sherbrooke, says, “The solution needs to take what is the traditional way of building and modify it a way that becomes safer. In the colonial time, things were done in masonry, which is not a good solution in earthquake regions. They started using wood as a material building for houses in Haiti maybe at the turn of the last century, until 1920-1930. These are what they call the ‘gingerbread buildings’, they are very decorative with a lot of detail and very beautiful. But you need specialized manpower and we don’t have that anymore. They were rather good in terms of earthquake loading. They are light and have a lot of energy dissipation capacity. They use nails to connect the posts and beams. During a quake this moves and dissipates energy”. But Paultre confirms that the concrete-blocks-as-filler style of slab construction adopted as the nation got poorer probably was a major cause of fatalities in the earthquake.

“One big, big problem in Haiti is all of the slabs of the buildings are made by putting concrete blocks in the slabs to reduce the amount of concrete you would pour”, he says. “These blocks are just hanging there and retained by the concrete around them. A little shaking and they will fall off.

Just one will kill a person. You might have 40 or 50 of them in a room. That’s a major problem. The way they make those slabs, they are very heavy. The columns are flimsy, they shear, the whole slab will collapse. The next floor below cannot take the weight, so it collapses, and so on”. He adds that builders of multi-storey buildings in Haiti “need to do the inverse of what they are doing now. They should use big columns and small beams. The beams can be damaged, but they dissipate energy. Stop using those blocks in the slab. This is terrible. You have a sword above your head. Learn how to do slabs simpler, lighter. Use frames. I don’t think it would be very much more costly. There is a way to do it and do it right, it will take education, information, teaching and learning”, Paultre says. NCSU’s Birkland adds, “We need to ask some architects and area experts to get together to build homes cheaply, but sturdily enough. But sometimes architects tend to look at these things as a clean slate. We learned in Katrina that having a bunch of out-of-town planners treating a city as a studio project doesn’t work for the local people”.

Dan Whipple