By Kira Taniguchi

Rathje in front of collapsed presidential palace after 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti.

Ghannoum, assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, arrived in Haiti on Thursday, Jan. 21. 2010, just one week after the earthquake hit. The ports were not functioning, the airport was barely getting organized and the military had just arrived.He arrived back in the U.S. approximately a week later on Jan. 29. An expert in assessing structures affected by earthquakes, Ghannoum made the decision to go to Haiti only three days before he found himself on a plane headed for Santo Domingo. It was his first time to visit a disaster site.

“I had it in my mind that it would be good to go,” Ghannoum said. “I’m not a doctor so I can’t help people in that sense, so I thought ‘I’m doing what I can do.’”

Ghannoum, who began specializing in the collapse and hazard part of the earthquake equation, first learned about the opportunity to go to Haiti after both the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group and the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research sent e-mails seeking French-speaking engineers. The United Nations, local government and other main entities on the ground in Haiti all sustained major damage, and a team was needed to assess the remaining structures Ghannoum said.

After receiving all of the recommended shots, he met the rest of his team, which consisted of 10 French-speaking engineers, in a hotel in New York. There, they devised a plan. One of the team members knew someone in Santo Domingo who runs small, private charter airplanes, so the team flew straight from Santo Domingo to Port-au-Prince. They left Jan. 20, just one day after one of the largest aftershocks occurred. 

“It was intense, really intense,” Ghannoum said. “Our first sign of trouble was the airport – it was in pretty bad shape.”

The team spent the first night in Port-au-Prince at a school, and then relocated its campsite to the UN headquarters at the edge of the airport. That site became home for the next week.

“The third day [of assessing the structures] was when we saw the biggest damage — it reminded me of war scenes — it was completely leveled,” he said.

Aftershocks, which can be just as large or larger than the original quake, are one of the major risks associated with assessing structures, and they were Ghannoum’s biggest fear. The team could be inside a building assessing the structure, and an aftershock could hit with the team still inside. Since only half of the bodies had been recovered when Ghannoum and the team were in Haiti, that meant the other half were still in the buildings. Therefore, hygiene was another concern for the team. Civil unrest was also a worry in the back of their minds. Humanitarian efforts were just starting to trickle in and some people had been without food and water for a week.

Eddy Germain from the New Jersey Department of Transportation and Wassim Ghannoum, assistant professor in UT's Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, in front of collapsed school in Haiti.

“We were worried that people might get edgy, none of this happened thankfully,” Ghannoum said. “The population seems to be resilient and very hopeful. I never felt unsafe.”

Ghannoum and the team assessed the building structures according to protocol developed by earthquake engineer specialists from the Applied Technology Council. The basic procedure is a 10- to 30-minute visual inspection of the buildings, a longer two- to three-hour inspection and a final structural assessment. Limited on time, the team only performed the primary visual inspections.

“We would scan for any danger from the outside, if it was safe, we would go in,” Ghannoum said. “We were looking for critical damage in columns or walls – vertical elements – to see if there was any likelihood of collapse.”

The government lost 80 percent of its buildings in the quake. The team inspected remaining buildings that were critical to the renewed operation of the government including the U.N., Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Justice, hospitals and orphanages. Ghannoum inspected a complex of the general hospital, which consisted of 20 buildings.

In addition to assessing the building structures, Ghannoum and his team created another lasting impact. They created the Emergency Engineering Support Unit, which now has a full budget in the U.N. The unit functions as a way to organize other teams to do exactly what Ghannoum and his team did in Haiti in the event of other disasters.

Ghannoum said he would go again after his first encounter with a disaster site.  He said he will never forget the experience, and recalled the friendliness of the locals. The team members would stop and ask directions, and the locals would point them in the right direction. “It was a wonderful experience,” he said.

Rathje, associate professor in UT’s Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, also answered the call for help. She made the trip to Haiti to investigate how soil conditions influenced the damage caused by the earthquake.

Rathje arrived in Haiti on Jan. 31 and stayed through Feb. 5. As co-chair of the Geo-Engineering Extreme Events Reconnaissance organization, Rathje organizes teams to visit disaster sites to document the geotechnical aspects of the location.

“When the earthquake occurred, our organization decided to send a team,” Rathje said. “I was the leader, and I put the team together.”

A veteran of visiting disaster sites, Rathje said the intensity of the Haiti quake was comparable to that of the 1995 earthquake in Turkey. While Turkey sustained damage during the ’95 quake, the damage in Haiti was much more widespread and extended over a larger area, so it affected more people, she said.

As a geotechnical engineer who studies soil, Rathje and her team traveled to Haiti to look at the damage induced by the earthquake. Since such conditions can be difficult to replicate in a lab, visiting actual damage sites proves to be a valuable learning opportunity.

“You can think of each earthquake as a living lab where you can learn lessons,” Rathje said. “Anytime we can go look at the actual geological response to an earthquake is valuable learning.”

This time, Rathje and her team studied how and why soil characteristics might have influenced the intense damage at the port.

Damage in Port-au-Prince encountered by UT's Ghannoum.

After flying into the Dominican Republic, Rathje and her team were allowed to set up camp in the gardens of a hotel that had been under construction. They brought all of their own food and used the showers and bathrooms in the hotel. Arriving about three weeks after the quake, Rathje said commerce was just beginning to start again.

“It was clear that people of Port-au-Prince had mobilized themselves in tent cities,” she said. “We saw many markets and people selling things on the street.”

To determine if soil failure caused the damage, Rathje examined surface features for cracking and movement. She utilized handheld devices such as the dynamic cone penetrometer to test the soil. It is pushed into the ground to measure the density of the soil. They also conducted surface wave testing.

Although the team focused on the port and coastal facilities in Port-au-Prince and coastal facilities farther west, Rathje said damage patterns within the main city center in Port-au-Prince, where the soils are younger, were also examined.

For an earthquake of this magnitude, there were not as many landslides as Rathje would have expected. One cause of this could be that the earthquake may have been shorter or the shaking might have been less intense than originally reported. Rathje and her team are currently looking into other possible causes for the deficiency of landslides that occurred in the area.

With the knowledge of their findings and through their contacts with the U.S. military, Rathje and her team were able to make recommendations to the Haitian government on how best to rebuild.

Rathje and Ghannoum traveled to Haiti to do what they do best, and in the process, their discoveries are a step in helping a devastated country rebuild.

“People are starting to get back to their daily lives as best as they can,” Rathje said.