UI professor hopes to help island nation rebuild in safer way

After a week in Haiti, Scott Olson is saddened but not surprised by the extent of earthquake damage there.

The University of Illinois civil engineering professor traveled to Haiti on Jan. 30, and returned Feb. 6. He was stunned by the extent of the damage, but hopes geotechnical engineering can help the island nation, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, find better building practices.

Even before leaving Urbana, Olson suspected that a wharf area needed for offloading medical supplies and food was irreparably damaged because it had never been built right in the first place.

Aerial photos suggested to him that land for the dock area had been reclaimed from the sea by "pulling up dump trucks full of sand, and pouring it in there until it broke through the waterline." A modern roadbed was built atop that foundation, but in a magnitude 7.0 earthquake, "the sand turned to quicksand," liquefying and following gravity to the bottom of the bay.

Damage to the docks and wharves in Port-au-Prince was largely caused by such liquefaction of the reclaimed land, Olson said.

As one of nine engineers and scientists on a Geo-engineering Extreme Events Reconnaissance team, the only member from a Big Ten school, Olson also walked the streets and took video of mass destruction caused by a combination of tremors, poor building practices, and simple poverty.

"Haiti is largely deforested, so there's no wood to build structures with," he noted.

Steel is also expensive, and builders, when they used reinforcing bar at all, didn't use enough, used rebar that was too small in diameter, and used a smooth variety that concrete didn't cling to. Smooth river rocks in the concrete did not cohere as well as coarse stone.

Olson, who has already presented programs at his children's school, will give a more technical talk open to the public, at 11 a.m. Tuesday in the Coordinated Science Laboratory Auditorium, 1308 W. Main St., U.

Lacking wood and steel, Olson says, Haitians turned to what they had plenty of: limestone.

"Haiti basically rose from the sea, and all that sea life eventually fossilized into limestone," Olson said.

Lime makes a very poor cement, the engineer said. It's everywhere, and it's inherently weak, he said, showing how easily a knife slides into its mortar.

Olson said particularly dangerous were the heavy concrete roofs, which caused buildings to pancake as tremors shook the ground.

Scientists and engineers will make recommendations for improving the infrastructure of Haiti, but Olson said the nation's poverty remains a stumbling block.

Despite that, he said, the people he met were friendly and helpful. Untold numbers live in tent houses now.

Olson and his team also lived in tents, but had electricity and other amenities. The tents were on the patio of a future hotel, with palm trees growing between the wooden decks.

"It was like being in a tropical paradise, surrounded by hell," he said.

Other challenges the nation will face include mountains of garbage that could flow into streams and then into the nation's bays, where resultant fish kills could temporarily stop one of the more lucrative trades available to Haitians.

The weeklong trip was funded through the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program.

Also participating in the investigation were Ellen Rathje and Oscar Suncar of the University of Texas at Austin; Jeff Bachhuber of Fugro/William Lettis and Associates; Brady Cox of the University of Arkansas; Jim French of AMEC/Geomatrix; Russell Green of Virginia Tech; Glenn Rix of the Georgia Institute of Technology; and Donald Wells of AMEC/Geomatrix.