Update on Haiti

Haiti Water and Sanitation Update

Water Station in Belloc, Haiti

Over the Spring break Dr. Mimi Sheller traveled to Haiti to present a final report on the NSF-Rapid research conducted in 2010 with professors Franco Montalto, Patrick Gurian and Michael Piasecki on post-earthquake water and sanitation reconstruction in Leogane. We held a meeting of the community groups who had participated in our 2010 Workshop and presented them with a final report translated into Kreyol, as well as giving a presentation and answering their questions. An English version of the report is available here: Final HAITI Report

We are also pleased to have published an article on “Women’s Water and Sanitation Needs in Post-earthquake Leogane, Haiti” in the online journal wH2O: The Journal of Gender and Water, Vol 2., No. 1. The article can be found here: http://issuu.com/wh2ojournal/docs/vol2_no2. wH2O is a new initiative at the University of Pennsylvania that publishes an annual online, open-access academic journal and blog focused on gender and water/sanitation issues worldwide. Dr. Sheller will also be presenting this work at the April 9th Conference of the Philadelphia Global Water Initiative on Gender and Water: Leading Beyond the Burden. Information on the conference can be found at http://pgwiconference2013.wordpress.com/

Flooded farmland around Lake Enriquillo

Finally, Dr. Sheller also began work on a new NSF-RAPID project with colleagues at CCNY (see an overview at http://www.ccny.cuny.edu/news/spring-break-lake-enriquillo.cfm). The project, RAPID: Understanding Sudden Hydro-Climatic Changes and Exploring Sustainable Solutions in the Enriquillo Closed Water Basin (Southwest Hispaniola), Award #1264466, seeks to understand the causes for, impact of, and potential mitigation strategies in response to the rising water levels of two lakes on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic which have submerged farmland, houses, roads, and are threatening entire towns. Dr. Sheller conducted 35 interviews on the social and economic impacts of the flooding with local inhabitants and leaders in affected areas of Haiti (La Source, Fonds Parisien) and the Dominican Republic (Boca de Cachon, Jimani, Discubierta).

Fore more information please contact: mimi.sheller@drexel.edu

NSF Research Award

NSF Award #1264466

RAPID: Understanding Sudden Hydro-Climatic Changes and Exploring Sustainable Solutions in the Enriquillo Closed Water Basin (Southwest Hispaniola)

The mCenter is pleased to announce the award of a Rapid research grant from the National Science Foundation, with the following investigators in collaboration with CCNY:

Jorge E. Gonzalez (Principal Investigator) gonzalez@me.ccny.cuny.edu
Reza Khanbilvardi (Co-Principal Investigator)
Fred Moshary (Co-Principal Investigator)
Michael Piasecki (Co-Principal Investigator)
Mimi Sheller (Co-Principal Investigator)

Abstract

The two largest lakes in Haiti and the Dominican Republic are, respectively, the Saumatre and Enriquillo lakes, both of which are salt water lakes. Lake Enriquillo is at the lowest point in the Caribbean, and is within several miles of Lake Saumatre. Both lakes have been growing drastically in size over the past several years. The socio-economic impact of this growth of the lakes has been very dramatic. Since the lakes began their recent rapid growth, more than 15,000 hectares of agricultural and grass land around the lakes have been flooded, having a strong negative impact on 2,500 farms in 16 communities with total estimates of 10,000 individuals affected. Urgency to address this growth problem has risen sharply over the past few months due to the unprecedented water levels reached. Further, the Caribbean is in the midst of its tropical depression/hurricane season, a unique time for embarking on a research effort as the Lakes are responding to these extreme events in a unique fashion. The window is relatively short and if missed would require waiting an entire year to possibly get a similar weather pattern passing through the lakes region again. Meanwhile, the emergency resulting from floods will have worsened. The research plan integrates observations, integrated earth-system modeling and community engagement and is designed to lead to accelerated documentation of the causes of the growth and to support policy formulation for handling the consequences. The urgent questions in need of answers are: Through rapid monitoring and modeling, can the hypothesis be supported that a warming climate is impacting the overall hydro-balance of the lakes? How is this hydro-balance reflected in terms of lake volume and surface area? What may be the response of informed communities to the emergency presented by continuously expanding flood lands?

In relation to mobilities research the question of how communities adapt to climate change and disruptions caused by changing environmental conditions is very important. This project builds on previous research on post-earthquake Haiti, and also involves collaboration between engineers and social scientists.

For more information please contact Mimi Sheller, Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy, mimi.sheller@drexel.edu

 

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

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

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.

Leogane, Haiti: NSF Research Award

Haitian Infrastructure Reconstruction

A Drexel Engineering Cities Initiative team including Drs. Franco Montalto (CAEE), Michael Piasecki (CAEE), Patrick Gurian (CAEE), and Mimi Sheller (CoAS) has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) RAPID Response Grant entitled “Supporting Haitian Infrastructure Reconstruction Decisions with Local Knowledge: A Case Study Focusing on Water and Sanitation in Leogane”. An overarching hypothesis of the project is that, in the wake of the January 12 earthquake, “sustainable” reconstruction requires a focused effort to incorporate local knowledge into all levels of post-disaster infrastructure decisions, and that rehabilitation priorities based on local knowledge elicited through stakeholder-driven process will differ fundamentally from those developed by technical experts based outside of the service area. To test this hypothesis, the team focuses on water and sanitation issues in Leogane, a town of approximately 80,000 people located about 30 km to the west of the capital and at the quake’s epicenter.

The team will travel to Leogane from May 28th to June 5th, to conduct surveys of water and sanitation infrastructure and citizens’ views on it and will return again in late June to conduct workshops with local stakeholders and civil society. They will present their findings in a report to be distributed to partners and participants in Leogane, and to be presented at an NSF-sponsored workshop on Haitian reconstruction to be held in the fall.

For more information please contact mimi.sheller@drexel.edu; updates on the project will be available at: http://twitter.com/HaitiWater