This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Schools

Ga. Tech Engineers Discover Way to Rebuild with Rubble in Haiti

Researchers have discovered a method of recycling earthquake debris into quality concrete. Now they want to help Haitians do it on a mass scale.

In the academic world of scientific inquiry, it usually takes more than a decade for results to be implemented in a concrete way that affects everyday people.

For a team of civil engineering researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, this process is happening faster.

Led by Haiti-born professor Reginald DesRoches, they've discovered that Haiti's huge quantities of rubble can be recycled and mixed by hand into sturdy concrete that meets or exceeds construction standards.

Find out what's happening in Midtownwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Thirteen months after an earthquake shook Haiti, many buildings still lie pancaked where seismic waves felled them Jan. 12, 2010. The amount of debris, some moved and dumped into the ocean or on river beds, is staggering. Just how much rubble is difficult to determine, but DesRoches and his team estimate there are roughly 20 million cubic yards, or enough to fill the Lousiana Superdome five times -- all of it on an island the size of Maryland with a population of about 10 million people.

"Debris isn't sexy," wrote DesRoches and two other professors, Ozlem Ergun and Julie Swann, in a New York Times op-ed last July. "Images of blocked-off streets don’t inspire people to help in the way pictures of hungry or needy people do."

Find out what's happening in Midtownwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

A way to recycle debris, however, could be vital in rebuilding Haiti's broken infrastructure and other earthquake- or war-stricken areas.

Members of the Georgia Tech team have received e-mails of interest from all over the world, including the Gaza Strip, since they published their findings in January in the American Ceramic Society Bulletin.

"We wanted to show, 'Hey, this can be done with your hands,'" said professor Kimberly Kurtis, who works in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

The next step is finding aid organizations to coordinate more research and the use of the concrete-mixing technique on a mass scale, with the cooperation of the Haitian government. This is a complicated undertaking under any circumstances, even more so in a country crippled by natural disaster.

"The political situation down there is very complex," Kurtis said.

Several times in a recent interview she and graduate students Joshua Grasham and Brett Holland stressed that helping Haitians is their foremost goal. They don't view study results as an imperial directive but as an evolving method that needs more imput and more research.

"We don't want to say we're these Americans who have all the answers," she said.

Holland added that the study was exploratory and "purely to show, 'Is this feasible?'"

It is, they discovered, and relatively cheap and simple. Mixing quality concrete is all about exact proportions of clean, properly sized aggregates. Much of the concrete in Haiti can only withstand 1,300 pounds per square inch, in many cases because unskilled laborers without the proper resources have eyeballed ingredients instead of measuring them exactly.

Concrete this weak can be broken up using an ordinary hammer and does not meet seismic-resistance standards. By mixing readily available substances like river sand and fine clay with the rubble and cement in just the right way, the resulting concrete is more than twice as sturdy -- strong enough to take the pressure of an elephant's foot or a 2,500-pound car in one square inch.

Gresham traveled to Haiti last May with DesRoches to get samples, learn from Haitian construction workers and, incidentally, how to say the components of concrete in Creole.

(Watch a slideshow of photos from their trip to Port-au-Prince here.)

The experience moved him to write a personal account in the American Ceramics Society Bulletin on the urgency of the research and what a difference basic infrastructure makes in everyday life.

Witnessing the resolve of the Haitian people has stuck with him, he wrote in a recent e-mail.

"Through all the extremely difficult times they have encountered, everyone is working together to do whatever it takes to regain their sense life and community," he said. "Witnessing their selflessness in that circumstance is incredibly humbling and motivating."

The Georgia Tech engineers who studied Haitian rubble are working on other research now. Kurtis is testing the durability of coastal bridges, for example. In most engineering research of this nature, she said, the societal impact is "10, 15 years down the road."

In Haiti, she expects people will be recycling rubble and rebuilding much sooner.

"It's nice here to have relatively rapid impact," she said. "It's really rewarding."

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?

More from Midtown