Social impact themes – Shelter and livelihoods

Didn’t have time to post yesterday because of a dinner with Oxfam GB and UN Habitat. Alas the internet hasn’t been good enough to post more pics on Flickr either. So I decided to give a short photo post of the social impacts team’s (Harley Etienne, Rebekah Green, Scott Miles, and Rob Olshansky) two primary themes  — shelter and livelihoods — in four photos.

SHELTER

Damage and fear of aftershocks (or another large earthquake) has displaced over 1 million Haitians from their home.

This has resulted in about 315 IDP camps in Haiti sheltering 7-800,000 people.

LIVELIHOODS

Haiti is a mix of life-in-progress and disaster recovery. Commerce is still happening, often as if nothing has happened. Of course the economic landscape has change temporarily and permanently as Haiti starts the long recovery process.

Some means of livelihoods create a symbiosis; for example, salvagers remove steel from debris for selling, which simplifies debris removal for owners.

First full day – some observations

Scott posted the strategy of the social impacts team. One of the lasting impressions I have from speaking to vendors and IDP camp residents is the still critical need for basic relief supplies: food, water, medical supplies and larger tents to replace the schools, church, and hospital facilities. While these needs are evident, many people first spoke about the need for jobs. Everywhere we went, people were looking for jobs of any kind. Even the venders who sat on the street said they only came because there was nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. They had few customers. The is a heavy sense of everyone waiting and waiting, but for no one could really articulate for what.

In the afternoon, two members of the team also spoke with a Bishop of one of the country’s major religious organizations. Most of the country’s social services are provided through church complexes – schools, clinics, nutrition sites, feeding sites, cultural activities, and services for marginalized community members. The high percentage of church properties that experienced collapsed or heavily damage, certainly well over half in the Port-au-Prince area, will have significant and long-lasting impacts beyond church parishioners.

Second EERI Reconnaissance Team Travels to Haiti 2/28/10

A multi-disciplinary team of US earthquake researchers and practitioners, organized by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), is traveling to Haiti to document scientific, engineering and societal effects resulting from the devastating January 12 earthquake in Haiti. The research team is under the leadership of Reginald DesRoches, Professor and Associate Chair of the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, a native of Haiti and a current EERI Board member, and includes experts in engineering, urban planning, architecture, geography, and community resilience.

The team departs on February 28, 2010 and will spend six days collecting data and documenting observations, paying particular attention to the disaster’s impacts on people, the performance of structures and lifelines, and the enormous societal challenges of relief, recovery and rebuilding. Team members will meet with local Haitian engineers, architects,and planners, as well as Haitian government officials and business leaders that will lead the nation’s reconstruction.

Download a list of team members traveling to Haiti

In addition, the ASCE Technical Council on Lifelines Earthquake Engineering (TCLEE) team, led by EERI member Curt Edwards, will be traveling to Haiti at the same time, and collaborating with the EERI team.  Information on the TCLEE team is available on the ASCE website. The scale of this disaster is so large that many organizations will be working together in conducting reconnaissance. The Learning from Earthquakes team will be joined by representatives from partnering organizations who are all traveling under Professor DesRoches’ leadership.

The enormity of the earthquake presents serious challenges for Haiti’s infrastructure, economy, and society. Estimates suggest more than 212,000 people died, 250,000 were critically injured and over one million Haitians were made homeless. EERI and the US Geological Society organized an advance reconnaissance team that visited Haiti in late January. Their trip report, including findings, is available elsewhere on this website.

GEER Haiti Reconnaissance Report Released

The Geo-engineering Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association, with funding from NSF, today released a summary report from their on-the-ground investigation following the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.  Researchers from numerous organizations worked collaboratively as a GEER team to perform a reconnaissance of the geological, seismological, and geotechnical aspects of the earthquake effects. The GEER team included many EERI members and the team was led by Professor Ellen Rathje, a member of the EERI Board of Directors. The results are summarized in a report recently published on the GEER web site at:

http://www.geerassociation.org/GEER_Post%20EQ%20Reports/Haiti_2010/Cover_Haiti10.html

Report on Remote Sensing & Damage Assessment Mission

EERI members actively participated in a multi-organizational effort (also described in several other posts under EERI activities) to analyze damage using aerial photography. This report, prepared by ImageCat Inc. summarizes this effort.

REPORT

360-degree web videos from Haiti

Immersive Media makes available 360-degree, geo-coded web videos of Haiti to help relief agencies, first responders, government departments and news organizations

Full-motion, interactive videos of earthquake devastation provide detailed views to aid emergency planning and response efforts, as well as the recovery planning

VIEW THESE VIDEOS HERE

Website for Historic Buildings in Haiti

EERI member and historic preservation architect Randolph Langenbach has created a blog site to document historic and vernacular construction in Haiti, its performance in the January earthquake, and plans for repair.  Follow his blog at www.haiti-patrimoine.org

Architecture for Humanity: Suggestions for Rebuilding

Read this non-profit’s plan for reconstruction, and thoughts on rebuilding and coordination.

Haiti Quake: A Plan for Reconstruction

EERI members help analyze aerial imagery–see results at VDV site

EERI Subscribing Member firm ImageCat Inc. acquired high resolution AERIAL imagery of Haiti to assist the World Bank in performing a preliminary damage assessment. EERI assisted in this phase, by recruiting volunteers willing to take on the analysis of one or more grids within a two day period. Within hours of sending out email, EERI had hundreds of volunteers willing to help out.

In total, over 500 individuals from 115 organizations representing academia, government agencies, non-profit organizations and private industry responded.

To view results, visit the Virtual Disaster Viewer website and select the Haiti event.

Photos of Port at Port-au-Prince by Glenn Rix, Georgia Tech

Steve Baldridge and I visited the main port in Port-au-Prince on Wednesday, January 27. There are two piers at the port. The north pier is where the crane is that many may have seen in photos. The wharf was completely destroyed by liquefaction-induced lateral spreading and is now submerged. At present, no effort is being made to restore operations at the north pier because of the extensive damage. The south pier was less heavily damaged with much of the damage concentrated in the batter piles. US Army divers assessed the condition of the piling supporting the pier and it was opened to allow one truck at a time to offload cargo. NAVFAC engineers are developing plans to repair that damage as quickly as possible to make the pier fully operational again. Unfortunately, one of the recent aftershocks caused more damage, and the pier was closed again on Tuesday evening and remained so through at least Wednesday when we visited.

« Previous Page — Next Page »