Lessons for Remote Post-earthquake Reconnaissance from the 14 August 2021 Haiti Earthquake
Authors
Whitworth, Michael RZ
Giardina, Giorgia
Penney, Camilla
Di Sarno, Luigi
Adams, Keith
Kijewski-Correa, Tracy
Black, Jacob
Foroughnia, Fatemeh
Macchiarulo, Valentina
Milillo, Pietro
Ojaghi, Mobin
Orfeo, Alessandra
Pugliese, Francesco
Dönmez, Kökcan
Aktas, Yasemin D
Macabuag, Josh
Publication Date
2022-04-29Journal Title
Frontiers in Built Environment
ISSN
2297-3362
Publisher
Frontiers Media S.A.
Volume
8
Language
en
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Whitworth, M. R., Giardina, G., Penney, C., Di Sarno, L., Adams, K., Kijewski-Correa, T., Black, J., et al. (2022). Lessons for Remote Post-earthquake Reconnaissance from the 14 August 2021 Haiti Earthquake. Frontiers in Built Environment, 8 https://doi.org/10.3389/fbuil.2022.873212
Abstract
On 14th August 2021, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck the Tiburon Peninsula in the Caribbean nation of Haiti, approximately 150 km west of the capital Port-au-Prince. Aftershocks up to moment magnitude 5.7 followed and over 1,000 landslides were triggered. These events led to over 2,000 fatalities, 15,000 injuries and more than 137,000 structural failures. The economic impact is of the order of US$1.6 billion. The on-going Covid pandemic and a complex political and security situation in Haiti meant that deploying earthquake engineers from the UK to assess structural damage and identify lessons for future building construction was impractical. Instead, the Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT) carried out a hybrid mission, modelled on the previous EEFIT Aegean Mission of 2020. The objectives were: to use open-source information, particularly remote sensing data such as InSAR and Optical/Multispectral imagery, to characterise the earthquake and associated hazards; to understand the observed strong ground motions and compare these to existing seismic codes; to undertake remote structural damage assessments, and to evaluate the applicability of the techniques used for future post-disaster assessments. Remote structural damage assessments were conducted in collaboration with the Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) team, who mobilised a group of local non-experts to rapidly record building damage. The EEFIT team undertook damage assessment for over 2,000 buildings comprising schools, hospitals, churches and housing to investigate the impact of the earthquake on building typologies in Haiti. This paper summarises the mission setup and findings, and discusses the benefits, and difficulties, encountered during this hybrid reconnaissance mission.
Keywords
Built Environment, remote reconnaissance, earthquake, building damage, remote sensing, landslides, data collection, InSAR, multispectral imagery
Identifiers
873212
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fbuil.2022.873212
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/337126
Rights
Licence:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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