Sources:

• 49 miles off the coast of Louisiana (National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling)
• 4.9 million barrels of oil (PBS)
• $6 billion of damage, $20 billion BP fund (Fox News)
• three bills to expand drilling immediately (Center for American Progress)
• better containment system…has not yet been tested in ocean conditions (AP)
• $300 billion disaster (MSNBC)
• less than 3/4 the size of BP (annual reports; you’ll have to trust my math)
• cleanup cost four times as big (Reuters; 23.6/6 = 3.9)
• no disaster insurance (AP)
• already debating how much to raise taxes (MSNBC)
• All the #s for nuclear liability were sourced in a previous column in the Sun-Sentinel ten months ago. (It felt indelicate to say “I told you so.”)
• most hospitals don’t drill for radiological emergencies, 85% of states are unprepared (ProPublica)
• no chain of command (ProPublica)

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Many have called for Haiti to be rebuilt earthquake-proof, and you might as well throw in hurricane and flood-proof as well, since the country sits in such a disaster-prone location. While this will probably be done for municipal buildings and other publicly funded buildings like hospitals, airports, schools and the like, the chances that the slums around Port-au-Prince will be rebuilt to withstand earthquakes are virtually nil. Most of them (most of the buildings in Haiti, probably) weren’t constructed to any building code, or even by an engineer or architect. Once the world’s attention gets distracted by some other crisis, most of the new buildings probably will be just as vulnerable.  

Much of the problem is due to the corruption and poverty endemic in Haiti, but I’ll leave the politics to my much more learned friend, Anthony. I want to ask: What can be realistically done, given Haiti’s current political problems, to reduce the loss of life in a future disaster?

Unfortunately, many of the easy answers, such as not building on high-risk sites such as hillsides or floodplains will not happen because of poverty, overcrowding and lack of government control. However, there could be a lesson to learn from a country that has suffered earthquakes and other natural disasters for millennia: Japan.

Currently, of course, Japan uses some of the most advanced building technology available. However for a long time, Japan embraced the unusual strategy of designing their buildings to fail.

While we usually consider buildings made of brick, concrete or stone to be strong and safe, in an earthquake they are among the weakest structures. While these materials can carry a large vertical load, allowing buildings to be sturdy, they cannot withstand even moderate horizontal forces, as happen in earthquakes. If you ever built towers from blocks when you were a little kid, you would know that it’s easy to make something strong enough to sit on but that nothing could save it if your baby brother gave it a small push.

The Japanese recognized this, and designed their homes from wood and paper. While many of them still fell down when an earthquake happened, they were so simple that they could often be rebuilt in a day. In addition, their lightweight construction meant that those inside had a much higher chance of survival and rescue.

The final irony is that another earthquake will probably not hit Haiti for a while, and that instead of trying to build buildings that can survive Armageddon, Haitians should focus on buildings that can shelter all the displaced during the next hurricane season.

Nevertheless, my (probably naïve) idea is this: provide an IKEA-like kit with instructions and materials (or just instructions) for building a simple, lightweight home that can be built and rebuilt quickly and won’t kill you when it falls down in an earthquake (or hurricane). Perhaps they could be modular or stackable, so that apartment buildings could be made instead of the heavyset concrete ones that collapsed. It will be a while before Haiti will have enough professionals to do construction; this would make life easier and safer for the amateurs.

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