Ellington

Leaving Port-au-Prince in an air-conditioned car with a military escort, UW Civil and Environmental Engineering professor Marc Eberhard heads toward the plane that will return him to Seattle. The view he has as he drives by is of camps of people living under tarps.

Recognized for his specialty in earthquake engineering and reinforced concrete structures, Eberhard was chosen to assess the damage caused by the January earthquake that struck Haiti. Returning to Seattle within the first week of February, Eberhard’s main focus has been writing a report that details the structural damage caused by the earthquake.

“I was chosen as team leader and was in charge of coordinating relations with other agencies,” Eberhard said. “They asked for volunteers, and what they were asking for was in my area of expertise.”

The United States Southern Command gave the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute and the U.S. Geological Survey five spots to fill. A spot was given to Eberhard because of his knowledge of engineering and his ability to speak French; the other four spots were given to a seismologist and three other engineers.

The team flew into Port-au-Prince on Jan. 26 and had four goals to accomplish in a week. These included installing strong motion instruments, lending support to the Southern Command task force and military agencies, assessing buildings and looking at ways to get different supplies into Port-au-Prince.

Before the earthquake, there were no strong motion sensors installed in Haiti; the group installed four. The group also evaluated hospital buildings, schools, headquarters for nongovernment agencies and looked at transportation bridges.

Eberhard’s team found that the technology to construct earthquake-sustainable buildings was available but not implemented. The Haitian buildings were not built to withstand earthquakes and had no reinforced details with earthquakes in mind.

“I was awed by the level of damage,” Eberhard said. “For the residential houses, poverty plays a big role. But there are very high-end properties that were damaged as well. One explanation I’ve heard is that storms come every year, and the focus on buildings has been hurricane-related, not earthquakes. The U.S. Embassy had a seismic-risk survey taken before it was built. The Hotel Montana was a high-end building as well, and it collapsed.”

Todd Janes, a graduate student studying civil engineering and structural mechanics, has discussed the Haiti disaster with Eberhard and believes that the reason for so much destruction was a lack of building codes.

“The government doesn’t require how construction goes,” Janes said. “The problem was a lack of building codes, so in a lot of places, there aren’t steel reinforcements in concrete, which is essential in the event of an earthquake to remain standing.”

The report that Eberhard’s team is working on will be a reference point required by the National Science Foundation in further research. Eberhard will continue to work with the Subcommittee on Disaster Construction, a part of the National Science and Technology Council.

Faculty interacting with other parts of the world and being involved in these interactions is common. Greg Miller, department chair for the Civil and Environmental Engineering department said that faculty members often participate in gathering knowledge from events.

What makes this report so special is that scenarios like the Haiti earthquake do not happen often.

“With this kind of thing — but certainly not disasters at this magnitude — where our faculty is out in different parts of the world and are involved in these types of interactions with communities who have worst-case scenarios, is quite common,” Miller said. “There are several aspects of what is going on. There is the technical-learning side and the technical-helping side where there is a general observation and learning that the whole world gets out of these events. Disasters are not common, but that type of involvement is.”

Student participation in the research of Haiti construction can be expected to grow as more decisions on the reconstruction of Haiti are made. Miller expects opportunities to arise in the next few years.

“I would not be surprised if there is further involvement over time on several levels,” Miller said. “Anything from student types of things to individual faculty serving on teams to help in various areas. The College of Engineering has a very strong Engineering Without Boundaries chapter, and the students in our department are very involved with that kind of thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if opportunities arise in the next couple of years to go and prevent things like this from happening again.”

Reach reporter Mary Jean Spadafora at news@dailyuw.com.