Haiti Two Years After the Earthquake

Knowledge Sharing from Mega Disasters

Drexel Professor of Sociology and mCenter Director Mimi Sheller will be joining a small team of international experts who have been invited by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute to provide advice to the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction and Recovery on lessons emerging from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami for developing countries. In that capacity Sheller will be going to Tokyo from January 14^th-19^th, 2012, along with 10 experts from the USA, Canada, China, India, Turkey and the UK to meet with Japanese researchers and government representatives. A second meeting including  experts from Turkey, Peru and Iran will take place later in the year. The team will be writing Knowledge Notes for the World Bank, conveying lessons on disaster response and recovery that will guide and influence its actions in countries like Haiti. For the first publication in this series see the GFDRR’s Earthquake Reconstruction Knowledge Notes.

Haiti Two Years Later

It is now two years since the terrible earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12^th, 2010. Despite the promises of “building back better”, little reconstruction has taken place there. At least half a million people are still living in minimal shelters in what were meant to be temporary camps. Little of the promised reconstruction money has actually been spent. For some important updates on the situation, see some of the following sites:

Two Years Later, Where Is The Outrage? By Melinda Miles, Let Haiti Live Founder and Director, Lethaitilive.org

Haiti After the Quake: Where the Relief Money Did and Did Not Go by BILL QUIGLEY and AMBER RAMANAUSKAS

Our Drexel research team has been writing up and publishing findings, and is planning a return trip to Haiti in the summer of 2012 to distribute a final report on the project, disseminate recommendations, and determine future plans of action in collaboration with Haitian partners. Following up on NSF Haiti-RAPID Award #1032184 ‘Supporting Haitian Infrastructure Reconstruction with Local Knowledge’, with PI Franco Montalto and Co-PIs Patrick Gurian, Michael Piasecki, and Mimi Sheller, we have submitted the following articles:

HC Galada, PL Gurian, FA Montalto, M Sheller, M Piasecki, T Ayalew, S O’Connor: Restructuring in the Midst of Disaster: Post-Earthquake Water and Sanitation Management and Payment Options for Leogane, Haiti, submitted to Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management.

M Sheller, S O’Connor, HC Galada, FA Montalto, PL Gurian, M Piasecki: Participatory Engineering for Recovery in Post-Earthquake Haiti, submitted to Engineering Studies, Special Issue on Engineering Risk and Disaster, eds. SG Knowles and G Downey.

HC Galada, FA Montalto, PL Gurian, M Sheller, M Piasecki, T Ayalew, S O’Connor: Transitions to Sustainable Sanitation Infrastructure in post-earthquake Leogane, Haiti: Including Stakeholder Preferences, Haiti, submitted to Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2013, Special Issue: Geographies of Water.

Further Publications

In related developments, mCenter Director Mimi Sheller has had the following article accepted for publication: M Sheller, The Islanding Effect: Post-Disaster Mobility Systems and Humanitarian Logistics in Haiti, accepted for Cultural Geographies, special issue on Islanding Geographies, eds. Eric Clark and Godfrey Baldaccino.

If you would like continuing news on our project, please join our 347 Twitter followers @HaitiWater where we continue to post news relating to water, sanitation, and overall reconstruction efforts in Haiti.

Also see the Special Issue of Earthquake Spectra on the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, published by EERI.

We also strongly recommend the new book: Tectonic Shifts: Haiti Since the Earthquake (Kumarian Press, 2012) Edited by Mark Schuller ,  Pablo Morales

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

Radio Times Interview

Drexel’s Haiti Research Team Interviewed on WHYY Radio Times

Collecting Water at Mon P'tit Village, Leogane, Haiti

Five months ago, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake ravaged Haiti, with its epicenter near the city of Leogane. Today’s Radio Times brings into the studio a pair of Drexel University professors who have just returned from Leogane, where they are conducting research on water infrastructure and what the community needs. Our guests are engineering professor FRANCO MONTALTO, who directs Drexel’s Sustainable Water Resource Engineering lab; and sociology professor MIMI SHELLER, who directs Drexel’s Center for Mobilities Research and Policy. They are conducting interviews and surveys to learn what the people of Leogane say they need, not what foreign agencies, no matter how well-meaning and how well-funded, decide they ought to need. And we’ll start off with a survey of how Haiti’s doing, five months later, with Trinity College and U.S. Institute of Peace Haiti expert ROBERT MAGUIRE.

Listen to the mp3

Second Letter from Haiti

Bill Clinton visiting Leogane

Following is another letter, dated June 3, 2010, from Jen Britton, Drexel Engineering Cities Initiative (DECI) research coordinator, who is currently in 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.

We’ve now passed the halfway point of our week here in Leogane. Yesterday we deployed our enumerator team for their first morning collecting street surveys on residents’ experiences and attitudes about water access. The enumerators are six university students from Port-au-Prince and Leogane.

The rest of us have brought in a considerable amount of information in the past two days as well. Drs. Montalto and Piasecki have mapped a range of drainage ditches, wells and latrines throughout the city of Leogane, gathering information from residents living near these features about where they get their drinking water, whether they have latrine or toilet access nearby, the incidence of flooding and the like. Drs. Gurian and Sheller have completed close to 20 mental modeling interviews with a diverse set of informants that includes a local farmer, hospital staff, NGO representatives and tent camp residents. All of these conversations are starting to form a coherent picture of the strengths, shortcomings and design challenges for upgrading the water and sanitation infrastructure.

On today’s schedule was a meeting of the WASH Cluster (the NGOs in Leogane working on issues of water, sanitation and hygiene), where Dr. Sheller found herself saying hello to President Bill Clinton who had dropped into Leogane for the morning to visit a tent camp and some volunteer rubble removal projects. There was also a meeting to get the Drexel team up to speed on the cooperative project between DINEPA (the new Haitian water authority instituted by the minister of public works and transportation), a member of the NGO Hands On Disaster Response who happens to have the right water infrastructure expertise, and the town’s plumber to map out status of the piped water system in Leogane.

Letter from Haiti

Boy Getting Water in Leogane, Haiti

“Letter from Haiti”

Five Drexel Engineering Cities Initiative (DECI)-affiliated faculty and staff are spending seven days in Leogane, Haiti as part of a National Science Foundation-funded “Supporting Haitian Infrastructure Reconstruction Decisions with Local Knowledge” project. The team includes professors Drs. Franco Montalto, Michael Piasecki and Patrick Gurian from the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering in the College of Engineering, 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, and DECI research coordinator Jen Britton. 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.

The following is correspondence from Britton on the team’s experience in Haiti thus far:

Our first day was a busy one, starting with an interview with Jumann Sifort, a radio journalist in Leogane, to get the word out about our presence here and the project’s goals. We visited with residents of the tent camp hosted at our guesthouse to find out how people are managing water and sanitation there. A tour of some of the Leogane neighborhoods was the start of a general assessment of physical conditions–in short, the remaining rubble removal job is considerable, and access to water sources for drinking and hygiene varies widely from one block to the next. The team also got started on a series of structured one-on-one interviews to build a picture of residents’ experiences with and expectations about water access.

The day concluded with a public meeting in which we joined a group of about 50 leaders and representatives of local civil society organizations, getting feedback from a range of interest-group points of view.

Feeling encouraged by the results of our productive first day, the DECI team in Leogane got started on the next phase of the project: working with locally hired enumerators whose job it will be to circulate around Leogane and carry out surveys with residents on water access. We assembled a group of six university students, five women and one man, hailing from Port-au-Prince and Leogane.

With a Mother’s Day celebration attracting a couple of hundred attendees and bustling with music, dance and speeches just outside our guesthouse door, we got down to the business of training the enumerators on survey practices and reviewing our particular survey’s questions—popping outside occasionally to see what the crowd was cheering about. There was a break in the action when Leogane mayor Santos Alexis arrived to introduce himself to the Drexel team. Dr. Gurian seized the moment to invite the mayor to participate in his mental modeling segment of the research, thinking they might schedule a time in the next couple of days. Mental modeling is a technique that tries to understand how people understand causal connections regarding technical issues. With the remark “Why put off til tomorrow what you can do today?,” the mayor sat down then for an interview session to have his perspective included in the data set.

A trip into town to interview a local retired fisherman as well as the project coordinator for the NGO Hands On Disaster Response took up the afternoon. When we returned to the guesthouse, the party was still roaring along, but with a new shift of dancers. We’ve wrapped up the day with a spirited debate about Haitian history and politics over dinner, and for purposes of diplomacy I’ll assess the score as evenly matched between Dr. Sheller and our two Haitian project assistants, Jean Vernet and Lavaud Vernet.

More information from DECI team’s trip to Haiti will be published in future editions of The Drexel Daily Digest. Follow the team on Twitter at HaitiWater or visit http://mcenterdrexel.wordpress.com/ for further updates.

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.