Teaching Building Professionals Design of Earthquake Resistant Buildings: Haiti Experience

When the strongest earthquake in over two hundred and sixty years struck the Caribbean island nation of Haiti in January 2010, part of the devastation was measured in hundreds of thousands of human lives lost as a result of the hundreds of thousands of buildings that were totally destroyed or severely damaged. Investigation as to why the buildings failed revealed that building professionals were not familiar with design and construction of buildings to resist earthquake loadings. Most of the buildings (some as tall as five stories) were not engineered, were built using poor quality materials and built by unskilled contractors. No official building code was (and is) available in Haiti and no inspection of building construction was ever conducted by the authority in charge of buildings. As the reconstruction and repair of the damaged homes had to start soon after the earthquake, it was important to educate all the stakeholders on the design and construction of earthquake resistant buildings in order to avoid such a catastrophe recurring in the next earthquake. This paper presents unique teaching methods used to teach Haitian practicing building professionals (architects, engineers and contractors) as well as home owners, government building officials and engineering students at the state university and other professional trade schools the basic but important aspects of design and construction of earthquake resistant one-and two-story concrete and concrete masonry un-engineered confined masonry buildings. The classes were offered in form of one-week workshops that had both classroom setting and three days of hands-on learning that included field visits and hands-on experience in the construction procedures. Graduates of the program were given jobs to construct new homes or repair damaged homes and then tested after a few projects in order to assess the success of the training program. The trainings as presented were found to be very successful.