Supporting Haitian Infrastructure Reconstruction

Getting Water in Haiti

International Area Studies and The College of Arts and Sciences will host the lecture “Supporting Haitian Infrastructure Reconstruction” as a part of International Cafe, on Thursday, October 21, 2010 from 2 to 3:30 p.m. in Macalister Hall, room 2019/2020.

During the past summer, a team of Drexel faculty and staff affiliated with Drexel Engineering Cities Initiative (DECI) traveled twice to post-earthquake Leogane, Haiti. Professors Franco Montalto, Michael Piasecki, Mimi Sheller, Patrick Gurian and DECI research coordinator Jen Britton assessed the status of the water and sanitation infrastructure and engaged local citizen stakeholders in a process of assembling data about what priorities Leoganais would apply to rebuilding these systems. The systems include irrigation and drainage canals, household water supply points and latrines. During the second trip the DECI team organized a consensus-building stakeholder workshop in Leogane to build a water infrastructure planning framework for the city, and they are currently analyzing the results. During this talk, members of the team will discuss what they learned in Haiti and the nature of participatory research and will share some of the early findings and conclusions. You can follow news on the project, on Leogane, and on Haiti via @HaitiWater on Twitter.

Drexel Workshop with Community Organizations in Leogane

This is a free event open to the Drexel community. Food will be provided. Macalister Hall is at 33rd and Chestnut Streets.

For more information, email Jacqueline Rios at jsr62@drexel.edu.

In addition,  a workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation and organized by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute was held on  September 30th and October 1st, to review all of the projects the NSF funded in post-earthquake Haiti. The workshop  offered a unique opportunity for focused cross-disciplinary discussions and collaboration for the hazards research community. A number of workshop resources are now available online.

Presentations from both days of the workshop are available on the EERI Haiti Earthquake Clearinghouse, along with all the breakout session report-back slides.  The EERI Haiti Clearinghouse hosts many other interesting resources including EERI reconnaissance reports, reports from other investigations, links to other programs, blogs, factsheets, etc.

Click here for the Haiti Earthquake Clearinghouse

The Haiti RAPID Projects Online Poster Room, hosted by the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEEScomm), will remain open on the NEEShub indefinitely.  We recently added the remaining project posters, and now have a full set of 32 RAPID project posters.  You may view and download any of the posters in the room by clicking the link next to ‘View/Download Poster’. In this room (near the top), you will also find a link to a PDF that includes all the RAPID award abstracts and a short biography of each Principal Investigator. The RAPID poster room is open to browse at your convenience.

Click here to visit the Haiti RAPID Awards Online Poster Room

Haitian Students who Conducted Surveys for Drexel Research team

Final Letter from Haiti

Final Letter from Haiti

A beautiful rural habitation in Leogane region

The following is the final letter from Jen Britton, Drexel Engineering Cities Initiative (DECI) research coordinator, who traveled to Leogane, Haiti, with a DECI team. The group, which also includes Drs. Franco Montalto, Michael Piasecki and Patrick Gurian from the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering in the College of Engineering, and Dr. Mimi Sheller from the Department of Culture and Communication and the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy in the College of Arts and Sciences, are working on the National Science Foundation-funded “Supporting Haitian Infrastructure Reconstruction Decisions with Local Knowledge” project. The project aims to gather information about area stakeholders’ needs, interests and priorities regarding any future improvements to the local water, sanitation and stormwater control infrastructure.

At the end of just one week in Leogane it seems like we’ve been here much longer, as each day has been packed not only with data-gathering but also with all the meetings, greetings and logistical puzzles that go along with transporting a team of 13—six local enumerators and seven Drexel faculty, staff and subcontractors—in two SUVs to various points of deployment around the region.

Yesterday had us back in the mountains visiting an agricultural settlement, where generous residents gave a tour of some of the problem areas created by deforestation and erosion as well as a sense of the difficulties of dealing with sanitation and water-access facilities that were damaged by the earthquake. While many families’ latrines are still nominally standing, there have been enough stories of post-quake collapse and injury that many people are too fearful to use the ones that remain. And in these hilly areas, collecting water becomes even more challenging when the walk to the nearest source of potable water might be 20 or more minutes over difficult terrain.

With the time that is left today, we’re headed to Port-au-Prince so that Dr. Piasecki and Dr. Montalto can make an appearance on the nationally broadcast television chat show hosted by Kompe Filo, a Haitian folk hero and journalist. The hour-long interview, with English-Kreyol translation by our team member Yves Rebecca, was a demonstration that high quality journalism is alive and well.

As we pack up our survey results, MobileMappers, interview notes and laptops, planning is already underway for our second-phase trip back to Leogane later in the summer. On this subsequent visit we’ll pursue additional interviews and feedback from relevant public officials and NGO representatives. The main event will be a public workshop that will use the results of these early data collection efforts to begin shaping the Leogani feedback into a coherent picture of how further water development might look in a locally controlled, technologically appropriate context.

For more information, visit http://mcenterdrexel.wordpress.com/.

Approved under the authority of Philip Terranova, Vice President for University Relations

Leogane Water Project

Follow HaitiWater on Twitter

The Drexel Engineering Cities Initiative (DECI) team will be leaving for Léogâne, Haiti, on May 28th. See our earlier post for more details on this NSF-funded project. Please follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HaitiWater for extensive coverage of news and commentary on post-Earthquake reconstruction efforts in Haiti, water and sanitation issues, and the progress of our trip.