Determining What's Safe in Haiti, and What Isn't

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (May 15) -- In the small schoolyard, a hundred students in matching yellow shirts sit shoulder to shoulder under the heat of a tarp. They are split into two groups: toddlers to 10-year-olds, and 10-year-olds to teenagers. And they share only two teachers, who stand a few feet from each other, in front of dull green chalkboards littered with math problems and some phrases in French.

Behind the school, an 11-year-old girl has sneaked away to urinate in the school's only "bathroom," a pile of rubble hidden behind a hastily hung towel. Her school is humble, at best, but for the opportunity to get an education, this is only a small price to pay. In fact, parents pay $85 per year to send their students here. An enormous sum for most families.

This is how every story in Haiti becomes another story. Because on the door of the Etoile du Berger school, an engineering team has just painted a small red sign: MTPTC 2. It means Inspection Team Two, from the Ministry of Public Works, Transportation and Communications, has inspected this building and decided it must be demolished.

The engineers move the children away from the crumbling cinder block walls of the schoolyard, but there is little more for them to do. The entire, walled-in schoolyard is itself only 15 feet wide. If the main building did collapse, there would be nowhere to go. The earthquake had an exponential effect on the poor.

Young architect Ritchy Mousseau, the leader of Inspection Team Two, never imagined he would be using his education in this way. "I analyze and make a report on the building," the 28-year-old says. "And after that, the ministry has to make the decision to move people out of it. I don't have the power to take people out of the building."

In a candid moment, he admits, he prefers it that way. It is frustrating, and scary, to sometimes find children in dangerous situations. But his job is taxing enough without being the heavy too.

Right now, 150 Haitian engineers are canvassing the city to assess the safety of 200,000 buildings. It is a $2.8 million project, led by the private assessment firm Miyamoto International and funded by the U.K. government and the World Bank.

Ultimately, Miyamoto International, with cooperation from the United Nations Office of Protection Services, will train 300 engineers over six months. Team members earn between $45 and $50 per day. When all is said and done, it will have been the biggest project of its kind in history.

This week, Inspection Team Two is working in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Carrefour Feuilles, along the south side of Avenue N, an impoverished community nestled among hillsides. Some houses are OK. But most have collapsed into the hills, the once angular geometry of architecture -- walls, corners, roofs -- now flattened, round and smooth as the earth beneath them.

Mousseau spends about 15 minutes in each building and tries to see 25 or 30 houses in a day. His first step is to walk around the perimeter and make a quick decision about whether it's safe for his team to go inside. His staff wears hard hats, which is a reminder of their profession. But they certainly won't do much good if the whole building goes down.

He then begins to look around inside for signs of damage. Each building will be designated with a red, yellow or green sign. Red buildings are completely unsafe, yellow buildings must be repaired and shouldn't be slept in, and green buildings are safe.

Though most buildings show some cracks, not all cracks mean the same thing and may not be dangerous. One of the easiest signs that a house will be designated yellow is the appearance of cracks that emanate from the windows. Mousseau sees it again and again, where the original builders installed windows into a wall without independently reinforcing them.

He then looks at a building's roof to see if any cracks exist, or if parts of neighboring buildings fell. A house is automatically yellow or red if another house threatens to fall on it. After making his decisions, he enters his data into a BlackBerry and uploads it to a database held by the Ministry of Public Works.

Neighborhoods were prioritized and targeted for inspection based on the desire to move people out of camps. The government of Haiti, working with the United Nations office, helped identify the most vulnerable temporary camps and is trying to encourage people to go home wherever possible.

But as the situation with the school demonstrated, the result of the assessment is less clear than it seems. Red buildings sometimes remain occupied, and green buildings are often left empty. Initial reports indicate that 40 percent of homes in some neighborhoods are green, but no one is going back. Right now, the color-coded designations have no legal power.

Local architect Philippe Leon says some homeowners are resisting the red designation because these buildings are sometimes fixable, for a price. He notes that if a building is abandoned, "Once it gets a red sign, people immediately come in and start stripping it, stealing doors, stealing wood."

Olivia Norrens lives with her five children in a house that was designated yellow. From Mousseau, she learns the house is unsafe because the walls are not attached to the ceiling. She found the unfinished home abandoned five years ago and paid someone "a lot of money" to install the dangerous roof. Technically, this house was unsafe even before the earthquake.

"I would leave, I guess, if I had somewhere else to go. But we're going to keep sleeping here because I don't have any money for a tent or a tarp," she says.

The second and third phases of the assessment project will try to force people to make repairs, perhaps with grants from cash-for-work programs run by the United Nations Development Program. With no formal enforcement policy in place, the students at Etoile du Berger will continue to study in the unsafe courtyard.

A few streets over, local pastor Harold Philemon learns his house is green, but he says he is fearful of another earthquake and will keep sleeping under the tarps outside.

Asked if he trusted the assessment of the engineers, he replies, "Of course I trust the engineers. They are professionals at what they do. But I trust God more."