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March 11, 2007 Guest
- Elizabeth Hausler
Program: The Foundations of Home
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 Most of the 26,000 deaths that resulted from
the December 2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran were caused by collapse of
unreinforced masonry and mud brick homes. A follow-up study of the 2001
Bhuj, India, earthquake showed that less than 40 percent of the
structures built by skilled masons during the height of reconstruction
had any earthquake-resistant features. In India alone, 85 percent of
houses are made of adobe or unreinforced masonry. Despite massive
efforts by NGOs and funding agencies to train and permanently upgrade
the skills of local masons, the prescribed earthquake-resistant building
technologies are too expensive to be used after emergency funding
ceases. As a result, new houses are just as likely to be as vulnerable
as those that collapsed during the earthquake.
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- According to Elizabeth Hausler, methods
of building low-cost quake-resistant houses using locally available
materials and skills do exist. Build Change promotes and implements
those methods in post-disaster reconstruction programs (e.g., Bam, Iran)
as well as in new housing finance programs in India. The goal of Build
Change is not only to build a new crop of earthquake-resistant houses
that generate income for local builders, but also to change existing
construction practices so that they endure without a continuous and
unsustainable stream of technical input and funding. Starting in high
school, Elizabeth spent her summers laying bricks for a masonry
construction company. With a PhD in civil engineering from UC-Berkeley,
she has studied the theory and application of earthquake-resistant
design.
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- For more information, go to:
http://www.echoinggreen.org.
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