As part of a National Science Foundation funded rapid response mission, Mann and his colleagues found evidence that the soils were shaken so violently Louis Vuitton handbags
they behaved like a liquid flowing across the landscape, a phenomenon known as lateral spreading and liquefaction. Earthquakes most likely caused by the same fault and resulting in the same soil motion destroyed Kingston, the capital of nearby Jamaica, in 1692 and again in 1907.
Wassim Ghannoum landed at the airport in Port-au-PrinceChristian Louboutin
just nine days after the quake as part of a team assessing the safety of still-standing buildings. About 80 percent of Haitian government buildings had collapsed, including the presidential palace. Vast numbers of government workers died. The president was running the country from a tent at the end of the runway at the capital's airport. The United Nations (UN), which had helped run the impoverished nation before the quake, lost 200 people when one of its main buildings collapsed. Police stations, hospitals and schools collapsed too. More than a million survivors were homeless, living in makeshift tents made of bed sheets.
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Asked if he had ever seen destruction on this scale,Wholesale designer bags he said it reminded him of Beirut after the Lebanese civil war.
"I just focused on my job, did what I had to do — get in, get out," said Ghannoum, assistant professor in the university's Cockrell School of Engineering.
The 10-person team, organized by the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (MCEER) at the State University of New York Buffalo at the request of the UN, broke up into smaller units and spent a week visually inspecting 120 buildings. They focused on critical infrastructure such as hospitals, warehouses, orphanages, UN buildings and government buildings. Buildings that were safe to continue using they marked green. Those that were partially safe, but needed work, they marked yellow. Unsafe ones were marked red. Ghannoum said in some areas of the capital, a third of the buildings were pancaked and another third were "hanging precariously." MBT shoes sale Of the remaining third that were salvageable, most needed repairs.
The team made an important first step, but it would take follow-on crews several more months to complete the inspections.
Finding Fault
Within weeks of the Haiti earthquake last January, five geoscientists and two engineers from The University of Texas at Austin traveled to the island nation to help assess the damage, identify future earthquake hazards, and make recommendations about hChristian Louboutin shoes
ow and where to rebuild. They surveyed Haiti from the air, land, coastline and sea.