AUTHOR=Whitworth Michael R. Z. , 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 TITLE=Lessons for Remote Post-earthquake Reconnaissance from the 14 August 2021 Haiti Earthquake JOURNAL=Frontiers in Built Environment VOLUME=8 YEAR=2022 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/built-environment/articles/10.3389/fbuil.2022.873212 DOI=10.3389/fbuil.2022.873212 ISSN=2297-3362 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.