Haiti's disaster of engineering

"Haiti was not a natural disaster," says TED Fellow Peter Haas: "It was a disaster of engineering." As the country rebuilds after January's deadly quake, are bad old building practices creating another ticking time bomb? Haas's group, AIDG, is helping Haiti's builders learn modern building and engineering practices, to assemble a strong country brick by brick.

I learned about the Haiti earthquake by Skype.

My wife sent me a message,

"Whoa, earthquake,"

and then disappeared for 25 minutes.

It was 25 minutes of absolute terror

that thousands of people across the U.S. felt.

I was afraid of a tsunami;

what I didn't realize

was there was a greater terror in Haiti,

and that was building collapse.

We've all seen the photos

of the collapsed buildings in Haiti.

These are shots my wife took

a couple days after the quake,

while I was making my way through the D.R. into the country.

This is the national palace --

the equivalent of the White House.

This is the largest supermarket in the Caribbean

at peak shopping time.

This is a nurses' college --

there are 300 nurses studying.

The general hospital right next door

emerged largely unscathed.

This is the Ministry of Economics and Finance.

We have all heard

about the tremendous human loss

in the earthquake in Haiti,

but we haven't heard enough

about why all those lives were lost.

We haven't heard about

why the buildings failed.

After all, it was the buildings,

not the earthquake,

that killed 220,000 people,

that injured 330,000,

that displaced 1.3 million people,

that cut off food

and water and supplies

for an entire nation.

This is the largest metropolitan-area disaster

in decades,

and it was not a natural disaster --

it was a disaster of engineering.

AIDG has worked in Haiti

since 2007,

providing engineering and business support

to small businesses.

And after the quake, we started bringing in earthquake engineers

to figure out why the buildings collapsed,

to examine what was safe and what wasn't.

Working with MINUSTAH,

which is the U.N. mission in Haiti,

with the Ministry of Public Works,

with different NGOs,

we inspected over 1,500 buildings.

We inspected schools

and private residencies.

We inspected medical centers

and food warehouses.

We inspected government buildings.

This is the Ministry of Justice.

Behind that door

is the National Judicial Archives.

The fellow in the door, Andre Filitrault --

who's the director

of the Center for Interdisciplinary Earthquake Engineering Research

at the University of Buffalo --

was examining it to see if it was safe

to recover the archives.

Andre told me,

after seeing these buildings fail

again and again in the same way,

that there is no new research here.

There is nothing here that we don't know.

The failure points were the same:

walls and slabs not tied properly into columns --

that's a roof slab hanging off the building --

cantilevered structures,

or structures that were asymmetric,

that shook violently and came down,

poor building materials,

not enough concrete,

not enough compression in the blocks,

rebar that was smooth,

rebar that was exposed to the weather and had rusted away.

Now there's a solution

to all these problems.

And we know how to build properly.

The proof of this came in Chile,

almost a month later,

when 8.8 magnitude earthquake

hit Chile.

That is 500 times

the power of the 7.0

that hit Port-au-Prince --

500 times the power,

yet only under a thousand casualties.

Adjusted for population density,

that is less than one percent

of the impact of the Haitian quake.

What was the difference

between Chile and Haiti?

Seismic standards

and confined masonry,

where the building acts as a whole --

walls and columns

and roofs and slabs

tied together to support each other --

instead of breaking off into separate members and failing.

If you look at this building in Chile,

it's ripped in half,

but it's not a pile of rubble.

Chileans have been building with confined masonry

for decades.

Right now, AIDG is working with KPFF Consulting Engineers,

Architecture for Humanity,

to bring more confined masonry training

into Haiti.

This is Xantus Daniel;

he's a mason,

just a general construction worker, not a foreman,

who took one of our trainings.

On his last job he was working with his boss,

and they started pouring the columns wrong.

He took his boss aside,

and he showed him the materials on confined masonry.

He showed him, "You know, we don't have to do this wrong.

It won't cost us any more

to do it the right way."

And they redid that building.

They tied the rebar right,

they poured the columns right,

and that building will be safe.

And every building

that they build going forward

will be safe.

To make sure these buildings are safe,

it's not going to take policy --

it's going to take reaching out

to the masons on the ground

and helping them learn the proper techniques.

Now there are many groups doing this.

And the fellow in the vest there,

Craig Toten,

he has pushed forward

to get documentation out to all the groups that are doing this.

Through Haiti Rewired,

through Build Change, Architecture for Humanity,

AIDG,

there is the possibility

to reach out

to 30,000 -- 40,000 masons

across the country

and create a movement of proper building.

If you reach out to the people on the ground

in this collaborative way

it's extremely affordable.

For the billions spent on reconstruction,

you can train masons

for dollars on every house

that they end up building over their lifetime.

Ultimately, there are two ways

that you can rebuild Haiti;

the way at the top

is the way that Haiti's been building for decades.

The way at the top

is a poorly constructed building

that will fail.

The way at the bottom is a confined masonry building,

where the walls are tied together,

the building is symmetric,

and it will stand up to an earthquake.

For all the disaster,

there is an opportunity here

to build better houses

for the next generation,

so that when the next earthquake hits,

it is a disaster --

but not a tragedy.

(Applause)