Man may be just as responsible as Mother Nature for the devastation caused by the Jan. 12 earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Three University professors said the country’s brittle construction is just as much to blame as the moving plates that caused the earthquake. In the lecture ‘Earthquakes Don’t Kill People, Poor Construction Does,’ Jeff Nunn, Michele Barbato and Alex Webb gave new perspective to the devastation in Haiti, where more than 150,000 people have died and more than 194,000 people are injured. Nunn, geology and geophysics professor, said the Earth’s tectonic plates get stuck in some locations. He said the fault eventually reaches a stage where the rocks break, and the energy that built up during the sticking overcomes the friction and creates movement along the fault. ‘The sudden movement along the faults generates seismic waves,’ Nunn said. ‘This was not an unseen event. This was a long-term geologic process.’ The damage caused during earthquakes is not directly related to how much energy was released during the plate movement, Nunn said. A magnitude 8 earthquake struck the Dominican Republic in 1946, but the earthquake caused less damage and only killed about 100 people because of the more rural location than a city like Port-au-Prince. Barbato, civil and environmental engineering assistant professor, said buildings in Haiti are constructed poorly because of the lack of proper engineering and available funds in the country. The United States government enforces a construction design code to sustain events like earthquakes and hurricanes, Barbato said. Haiti has no such code. ‘In Haiti, people are reconstructing [Port-au-Prince] with the same technologies and methodology as before,’ Barbato said. ‘If we don’t teach them … they won’t be able to sustain another earthquake.’ Barbato compared photographs of the crumbling buildings in Port-au-Prince to the still-standing and seemingly unaffected U.S. Embassy building in Haiti, which was built under the American code of construction.
Detailing in the building process is the key to better construction in Haiti, Barbato said. Detailing involves the steel within the concrete of the building, how much is used and how it’s shaped. Nunn said another earthquake in Haiti is unlikely because most of the energy along the fault has been released, and’ the next big earthquake will probably hit the Dominican Republic. ‘The Dominican Republic is another section where the faults are sticking,’ Nunn said. ‘Energy’s been storing since the 1946 earthquake.’ Webb, geology and geophysics assistant professor, said the entire island of Hispaniola was created by plate movements. Haiti is the western side of Hispaniola, and the Dominican Republic is the eastern side. ‘More than 100 million years ago, the Caribbean plate was sitting in the Pacific Ocean,’ Webb said. ‘Over time, it migrated between the North American plate and the South American plate. Haiti formed as a result of the moving plates.’ Sarah Beth Maxwell, geology senior, said the lecture was intriguing because even though she knew about plate tectonics, the civil engineering side of earthquakes was something she didn’t think about right away. This lecture was part of the Department of Geology and Geophysics Wilbert Lecture series.
Contact Mary Walker Baus at [email protected]