Lessons for Remote Post-earthquake Reconnaissance from the 14 August 2021 Haiti Earthquake

Abstract

On 14th August 2021, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck the Tiburon Peninsula in the Caribbean nation of Haiti, approximately 150 km west of the capital Port-au-Prince. Aftershocks up to moment magnitude 5.7 followed and over 1,000 landslides were triggered. These events led to over 2,000 fatalities, 15,000 injuries and more than 137,000 structural failures. The economic impact is of the order of US$1.6 billion. The on-going Covid pandemic and a complex political and security situation in Haiti meant that deploying earthquake engineers from the UK to assess structural damage and identify lessons for future building construction was impractical. Instead, the Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT) carried out a hybrid mission, modelled on the previous EEFIT Aegean Mission of 2020. The objectives were: to use open-source information, particularly remote sensing data such as InSAR and Optical/Multispectral imagery, to characterise the earthquake and associated hazards; to understand the observed strong ground motions and compare these to existing seismic codes; to undertake remote structural damage assessments, and to evaluate the applicability of the techniques used for future post-disaster assessments. Remote structural damage assessments were conducted in collaboration with the Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) team, who mobilised a group of local non-experts to rapidly record building damage. The EEFIT team undertook damage assessment for over 2,000 buildings comprising schools, hospitals, churches and housing to investigate the impact of the earthquake on building typologies in Haiti. This paper summarises the mission setup and findings, and discusses the benefits, and difficulties, encountered during this hybrid reconnaissance mission.

Empirical Fragility Analysis of Haitian Reinforced Concrete and Masonry Buildings

“…These buildings can be categorized into four distinct classes: RC frames with masonry infills (RCF), confined masonry (CM), reinforced masonry bearing walls (RM), and unreinforced masonry bearing walls (URM). This classification system was also utilized in the postearthquake analysis reports by StEER and others following the 2021 earthquake [2,38]. RCF is characterized by RC beams and columns, with masonry walls that are not structurally connected to the frame.…”

“…The gathered data were subsequently integrated into the StEER database and made available online [42]. Over 6000 structures were evaluated, covering a range of building types, namely, the four types presented above and wood light frames (WL), wood with stone frames (WS), and others classified as unknown [38]. It is essential to note the presence of numerous historical buildings in Haiti, known as 'Gingerbread houses', constructed at the turn of the 20th century-prior to the introduction of concrete in the country in 1914 [43,44].…”

Impact of Moisture Decay on Seismic Vulnerability: Haiti’s Wood-FramedVernacular Buildings

“…Haiti experienced a devastating earthquake on August 14, 2021 (Figure 1). The event with the moment magnitude of 7.2 took place within the onshore faulting through the Tiburon Peninsula (southern Haiti) and affected more than 800,000 people in over 137,000 buildings [1,2]. A hybrid reconnaissance activity to evaluate the post-disaster state in Haiti was carried out with the joint effort of Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation (EEFIT), Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) and GeoHazards International (GHI) teams.…”

Editorial: Disaster Reconnaissance Missions: Is a Hybrid Approach the Way Forward?

“…Importantly, remotely coordinated data collection activities highlighted the importance of more advanced data collection and management platforms. EEFIT's adopted LfE Mobile App (So et al, 2020;Aktaş et al, 2021;Aktas et al, 2022a) and StEER's Fulcrum (Whitworth et al, 2022) used different interfaces and workflows that allowed efficient collection and easy auditing of the data, while minimising data losses and intense post-mission digitisation and post-processing efforts that the conventional paper-based data collection methods are prone to. In near future, we expect the efforts towards flexible systems that will eventually find wider use within the relevant research community will be furthered for effective compilation of data needed in line with the specific aims and objectives of a given mission, as well as for viewing, auditing, managing and mapping them.…”