Photos from Haiti Earthquake
As I’m sure you are all aware the 12 January 2010 Haiti earthquake was a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake. Its epicentre was near the town of Léogâne, approximately 25 km west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital.
One of the Congress keynote speakers, Dr Sergio Mora has provided the blog with the following information and photos from his recent trip to Haiti.
Sergio has forwarded a set of pictures illustrating (before and after photos) the most typical examples of structural failures associated with the Haiti earthquake.
He makes the following comments:
“In some cases, I had the chance to take pictures, one or several months before the quake, during previous working missions.
As you can see, building practices in Haiti are extremely precarious. There was no building code in place, although there was already a draft which had been forwarded to the Government of Haiti by its authors on January 11th, 24 hours before the earthquake…!
On the other hand, some international companies, such as the telephone and internet provider Digicel, applied corporate standards and its 15 storeys building stood with no harm at all. In the pictures, you will also see totally collapsed buildings besides neighbouring structures, still standing and relatively harmlessly. So, selective damage must be the product of inconsistent practices. Perhaps even some minor care and common sense by builders, saved many structures.
It is clear that an M=7 event is quite a hit anywhere in the world, but we also have to admit that definitely not sufficient to generate the kind of damage that occurred. The extent and degree of damage was at least one or two orders of magnitude above what could have been expected just by complying to any average building code. The difference is indeed the very high vulnerability and the very low quality of design, location, building processes and quality control of materials.”
Thanks to Sergio for supplying the blog with some interesting photos and insights.
1a CentroComercialLesVillages-HotelMontana-Junio2009
1b LesVillagesMall-HotelMontana-Feb2010-SergioMora
2a Juvenat-Junio2009
2b Juvenat-Feb2010
3 NationalPresidentialPalace-PauP-Feb2010-SergioMora
4a CanapVert-BackENAF-Dec2009-SergioMora
4b CanapVert-BackENAF-Feb2010-SergioMora
5a HospitalSodec-PauP-Dec2009-SergioMora
5b HospitalSodec-Feb2010
6 Feb2010
7 InsufficientlyTiedupColumn-HotelKaribe-Feb2010-SergioMora
