Re: No Re-Bar In Haiti?

Stealing Steeling Safety & Prosperity


A couple of things have bothered me the past couple of weeks as I have watched the TV news footage and look at newspaper photos of the damage and desperation after the earthquake down in Haiti.

I'm not talking about looking at things from the standpoint of being a God fearing Human faced with unbelievable amounts of carnage and death. What I'm talking about this morning is a subtle point which to the layman could be easily missed when in passing you see all of the scenes of death and destruction and suffering...

UNLESS you can take the time to clear you mind and see the details beyond the humanity and mortal horrors you're seeing.

Excuse me if I am wrong, but I'm pretty darn sure that I haven't seen much if any structural steel reinforcement---what we call "re-bar"--in the concrete walls and floors and ceilings in most of the photos of the collapsed buildings in Haiti be it a Cathedral or a "Palace" or a peasant's home on the side of a hill.

I guess it's just my "Forensic Injuneer" senses activating when I see something that has broke and hurt/killed someone.

In my considered Redneck opinion, I say that the people of Haiti, sitting on a known seismic fault line (which is beyond most of the indigenous population's control) and building everything out of hand mixed and hand poured concrete or cement or whatever they call their "cast and precast masonry construction methods," without secondary steel tension reinforcing, are the victims of a horrid infrastructural framework which could have done nothing but lead to eventual failure and disaster.

Any second year engineering student which has taken Statics and Dynamics and Deformable Bodies and a couple of quarters of materials science knows this to be a fact.

I ask myself..."Where do they go from here?"

I've spent a good deal of time in South Florida, the Florida Keys, the Bahamas and the Caribbean and have always been envious of the solid concrete construction methods covered with stucco and tile.

Problem is, that in practice these methods as implemented originate with the "tabby" form of primitive concrete fabrication also used here in Coastal Georgia and Florida in the 17th and 18th century by colonial settlers who, faced with limited wood resources (or in Georgia trees so huge like the giant "Live Oaks" so as to be unsuitable for being used for construction of anything smaller than a navy sailing ship keel.)

Salty water and sand and limestone in the form of ground up sea shells and bits of ancient coral reef fragments make a lovely fireplace or impromptu footing for a patio gazebo and is fairly stable when the wind blows at hurricane force.

But when the ground starts jumping up and down and shakes five feet from side to side things aren't worth a crap unless there is some steel inside, in the form of high strength rods buried somewhere there in the middle or a couple of inches in from each surface.

In the end it's all a reality of simple physics...readily understood today.

And yet it doesn't take new and improved and ever more intrusive "building codes" to drive home this grim realization...but that seems to be the only rationalization and realization and solution I keep hearing tendered by the idiot talking heads in the newspaper and TV news blurbs.

All of that said, my problem is...

What can we do about it all?

Passing a new building code won't undo the destruction which has already been done, and raising the cost of construction to meet codes like those in Atlanta or San Francisco or Knoxtown or on the gulf coast in Panama City Beach Florida today in Haiti-- a country which can't afford running water and indoor toilets--is counter-productive if implemented in a typical government induced heavy handed fashion.

Earlier this morning I wandered over to the Habitat for Humanity Website trying to see what they were up to, but all I see is platitudes and requests for money to send down to Haiti.

I'm proud to tell you that I'm not sending the government and country of Haiti one single dollar until I see some resolution to change what has been going on down there over the past TWO HUNDRED YEARS.

Encouraging poor people to live in mud stucco huts while they produce generation after Generation after GENERATION of little humans in squalor, without any hope of financial success and a lifestyle above abject poverty unless they escape to the US or get a job in major league baseball of the NBA is not in my mind a good use of my time and effort and currently limited financial resources.

Falling back on my experience as a volunteer project manager with Habitat for Humanity, I would, however, enjoy the opportunity to help design and build some sort of shelter or home or condo or abode of any/every other description which is feasable for erection in this geographic situation.

I guess it's just a little too soon to get started with the implementation of that sort of effort until the dust settles. It would be cool to come up with some idea besides government trailers like FEMA foisted on the Katrina Victims, but maybe that's the way to go.

Hey, that's it...let's put all of those used and new left over government trailers which were misused and abused three and four and five years after the hurricane onto a boat and ship them down to Haiti.

You and I have already paid for them with our tax dollars, and selling them for scrap is an inferior resolution to GIVING them to someone that actually deserves them and could put them to good use.

Works for me...

How about YOU?