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

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

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

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.