RENEE MONTAGNE, Host:
We've reporting this week on Haiti's struggle to rebuild from its earthquake a year ago that turned the capital city, Port-au-Prince, into a death trap. Earthquake engineers say many casualties could have been avoided if buildings had been built better. Now engineers are trying to improve construction standards, as NPR's Christopher Joyce reports.
CHRISTOPHER JOYCE: In Port-au-Prince, there is so much rubble on sidewalks that people walk in the street. Everywhere, buildings sag in a state of semi- collapse. When engineer Pierre Fouche returned there after the quake, he hardly recognized his hometown.
PIERRE FOUCHE: When I got there it was a shock. Basically, it was like I lost all of my landmarks.
JOYCE: When the quake hit, Fouche was studying earthquake engineering at the University of Buffalo in New York. He knew that Haiti lacked building codes, that people built houses on steep hillsides or on soft ground, that they used shoddy materials, and now he fears the city will rebuild the same way.
FOUCHE: Some people, they are simply starting to reconstruct their homes because they need someplace to live in. And this is actually tragic.
JOYCE: Tragic because the country lacks people who know how to build for earthquakes. At the time of the quake, Fouche says he was Haiti's only quake engineer.
FOUCHE: We don't know when the next one is going to happen, and if we don't want to have 200,000 people dying, then this is something that has to be done. At some point the government will have to do it.
JOYCE: The government has not, however. So quake engineer Andre Filiatrault at the University of Buffalo has organized quake seminars for Haitian engineers. Filiatrault says most of the masonry buildings he's seen in Haiti cannot handle the side to side shaking that a quake creates. The walls develop cracks and then holes.
ANDRE FILIATRAULT: And if you have too much of a hole in the wall, then it can't support the slab above, and that's where all these slabs collapse on top of each other, which we call pancake collapse.
JOYCE: Filiatrault says you can fix that cheaply with something called confined masonry. You build a cinder block wall and at each end the blocks are set like a vertical row of teeth, with every other one missing. Then you pour concrete down and over that row of teeth to make vertical columns that anchor the wall.
FILIATRAULT: You cast your column into the wall such that it's a then integral part of the wall. So basically the wall becomes interlocked into the column.
JOYCE: Roger Bilham is a seismologist at the University of Colorado who's studied the past 30 years of earthquakes. He says poverty and corruption kill because they undercut construction standards. People cheat.
ROGER BILHAM: You can go to a collapsed building with a hammer or a screwdriver and test the quality of the cement. If you can put your screwdriver in and write your name in it, obviously the cement is completely inadequate.
JOYCE: In Haiti, Bilham says it wasn't so much corruption as poverty that doomed so many buildings. But he suspects that may change as money to rebuild pours into the country.
BILHAM: The corruption that does exist in the form of bribery, shortcuts, inexpensive materials and so on, I'm sure that's going to kick in. People are going to do whatever they can.
JOYCE: Christopher Joyce, NPR News.