Disaster Mitigating Design And Practice: A Student Centered Program Developing Sustainable And Earthquake Resistant Designs For Residential Structures In Developing Regions

Earthquakes frequently strike the neediest regions of the planet with devastating consequences for their inhabitants. Impacts of such disasters extend beyond the immediate casualties, which may reach several 10,000, including the destruction of residential and commercial property and infrastructure, which severely weakens the regional economy in the longer term. Simple residential dwellings from adobe, brick, or un-reinforced concrete blocks, which are the predominant structures in significant portions of the reviewed developing regions, are frequently damaged to structural failure and collapse by earthquakes, which may obliterate entire villages and their livelihood within minutes. Designing such small residential structures to be more resistant to earthquake loads, followed by physical testing of scaled models and implementing the design concepts in an actual prototype are the objectives of the program development for a two-semester course sequence that is currently being undertaken by the authors. This program began when guest presentations by Peace Corps alumni and the founder of Engineers Without Borders caused the students and their faculty mentors to realize that the traditional course of study in civil engineering did not sufficiently prepare them for addressing engineering problems within a global context. Since then, an introductory course on sustainability has been added to the curriculum and the students have founded a student chapter that has begun to participate in organizing the outreach to a partner community in a developing region. In a new course sequence on disaster-mitigating design and practice, the undergraduate civil engineering and architecture students are working together in entrepreneurially oriented teams. Faculty members and representatives from industry and from foreign aid organizations are collaborating in guiding the courses. The course activities address several accreditation outcomes, have been structured to expose students to all six levels of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives, and accommodate different learning styles. Active student participation in the course, including setting intermediate objectives, performing, presenting, and critiquing their literature review, creative design work, and testing in the laboratory are essential to the coursework. The features of this student-centered learning environment are presented along with recommendations for implementing learning experiences that groom globally aware and socially engaged young engineers. Background and Development Several years ago two alumni of the university gave a guest presentation about their two years of Peace Corps work in Central America to improve the access to clean water for the particular community. More recently, the founder of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) presented his vision of “building a better World, one community at a time” through this organization of student and professional chapters that reach out to partner communities in developing regions and work on improving their quality of life. The students and their faculty mentors realized that the traditional U.S. course of civil engineering study does not sufficiently prepare engineering graduates for assisting developing communities around the World. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) student chapter therefore requested that the Department of Civil Engineering expand its teaching portfolio to introducing the students to the needs of developing regions and building their skills to solve problems within a global framework of sustainability. Since then the faculty members have taken steps towards developing such programs, beginning with offering the “Sustainable Development Principles and Practice” course that covers sustainable development, international practices, policy, and ethics and complements the “Construction Systems and Planning” and “Civil Engineering Systems Management” course where engineering and architecture students create a detailed proposal for a semi-realistic team project (1). Subsequently, a task group examined the feasibility of further courses. A new student chapter of EWB has been founded at the university, which crystallizes the interest of the engineering students in bringing their skills to developing regions and which is enjoying an exceptionally active group of members. The research and education project described in this paper has grown from these original student-driven efforts. Need for Earthquake-Resistant Residential Structures While the news coverage in Western media often highlights the massive devastation caused by earthquakes in developing regions of the World for only a few weeks until other topics capture the public’s attention, their effects are felt by the inhabitants of the affected regions for decades. Severe earthquakes of larger than a moment magnitude of approximately 6.5 may injure and kills thousands if not ten thousands of individuals and can cause billions of dollars of damages to the built environment. The recent example of the Pakistan earthquake of 2005, which is only one among a long and frequently expanding list of seismic events that cause damages and destruction, may give an impression of the dimension of the typical impacts. On the morning of October 5, 2005 the mountainous Kashmir region experienced a shock with a strength of 7.6 on the moment magnitude scale. Kashmir borders the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan and is situated in a tectonically active area between the Eurasian and the Indian Plates that also have created the highest mountain range on the planet, the Himalayas (2). Approximately 87,350 fatalities, most of them in Pakistan, and an only slightly smaller number of injured people, 75,266, were directly caused by collapsing buildings and landslides. Some 32,355 buildings were destroyed and entire villages were obliterated. Up to 4 million people were displaced or left homeless. The severe loss of human life and the destruction of residential and commercial property and infrastructure are weakening the regional economy and are threatening an entire society. This is neither the first, not will it be the last natural disaster that impacts developing regions. In fact, most developing regions are located in tectonically active areas of the Pacific Rim, also known as the “ring of fire” due to the concentration of volcanoes and seismic events around the Philippine, Pacific, Cocos, Caribbean, and Nazca Plates, in Asia Minor along the Arabian Plate, and in Southeast Asia along the Indian and Australian Plates and are therefore prone to being frequently affected by earthquakes. An overview of selected significant earthquakes that have struck developing regions in the last two decades is given in Table 1. Note that only major earthquakes were included, and that many less severe earthquakes that also caused numerous fatalities, injuries, and millions of dollars worth of damages to personal property and infrastructure had to be omitted due to the limited space. The predominant traditional residential structures in many of these areas are mostly simple one and two-story adobe, rubble or brick masonry, or un-reinforced concrete block buildings (3, 4, 5, 6). Table 1: Impact of Recent Significant Earthquakes in Developing Regions Date Region Magnitude Fatal Injured Displaced Houses Destroyed or Damaged 5/26/06 Indonesia 6.3 5,749 38,568 600,000 578,000, $3.1B 10/8/05 Pakistan 7.6 87,350 75,266 4,000,000 32,355 3/28/05 Indonesia 8.7 1,313 400 300 12/26/04 Indonesia 9.1* 297,200 125,000 1,126,900 costliest ever 12/26/03 Iran 6.6 31,000 30,000 75,600 85%, $32.7M 5/21 and 5/27/03 Algeria 6.8, 5.8 2,275 10,461 180,000 43,500, $0.6B to $5B 3/25 and 3/27/2002 Afghanistan 6.1, 5.6 1,000 100’s 1,000’s 2,000 1/26/01 India 7.7 20,085 166,836 1,122,000 1/13/01 El Salvador 7.7 852 4,723 over 258,226 11/12/99 Turkey 7.1 894 4,948 extensive 9/20/99 Taiwan 7.5 2,400 8,700 600,000 82,000, $14B 8/17/99 Turkey 7.4 17,118 50,000 500,000 $6.5B 1/25/99 Colombia 6.2 1,885 4,750 250,000 60% 7/17/98 New Guinea 7.0 2,683 1,000’s 9,500 several villages 5/30/98 Afghanistan 6.9 4,000 1,000’s 1,000’s 2/4/98 Afghanistan 6.1 2,323 818 8,094 9/29/93 India 6.2 9,748 30,000 extreme 12/12/92 Indonesia 7.5 2,500 500 90,000 50-80% to 90% 7/16/90 Philippines 7.8 1,621 3,000 severe 6/20/90 Iran 7.7 50,000 60,0000 400,000 nearly all 12/7/88 Armenia 6.8 25,000 19,000 500,000 20 towns, 342 villages, $16.2B 3/6/87 Colombia 6.9 5,000 20,000 extensive, 27 km pipeline 9/19/85 Mexico 8.1 35,000 30,000 100,000 3,536, $4B * This seismic event was the fourth-strongest earthquake since 1900 and the worst in casualties. Regions may include neighboring countries. Missing persons are included under fatalities. indicates unknown data. Values of casualties and damages are estimates. Compiled from (7, 8, 9) Integration with Educational Outcomes This massive need to address this devastation and severe loss of lives in developing regions through solutions that improve the earthquake-resistance of simple residential structures has long been addressed by researchers (10, 11), but has not yet been tied effectively into the educational context. There is a need to educate globally aware and socially engaged young engineering graduates who holistically consider the complex interplay of technical, socio-economic, political, and cultural factors in designing and executing their projects. The research and education project that is presented in this paper has been designed to cover such educational outcomes as have been defined by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (12, p. 2), including: (b) an ability to design and conduct experiments, as well as to analyze and