Tonight: WWU professors to report on Haiti impact assessment at Bellingham City Hall
Scott Miles, assistant professor of Planning and Environmental Policy at Western Washington University’s Huxley College of the Environment and director of Huxley’s Resilience Institute, and Rebekah Green, associate director of the Resilience Institute, traveled to Haiti in late February to conduct impact assessments with the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute.
Miles and Green will report on their findings in Bellingham’s City Council chambers at 7 p.m. today, March 17, as part of an event looking at disaster risk reduction in Haiti and Whatcom County.
On Jan. 12, a magnitude-7.0 earthquake in Haiti caused extreme destruction to Haiti’s infrastructure, economy and society. Estimates suggest that more than 200,000 people died, with many more times that number critically injured, homeless, and destitute.
Miles and Green were part of a reconnaissance team of about a dozen earthquake disaster investigators, organized by EERI.
The mission was part of EERI’s Learning From Earthquakes program. This program, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, sends out multi-disciplinary teams into the field to measure impacts of damaging earthquakes. This provides policy-relevant information for immediate disaster management and recovery activities, while building knowledge about physical and social causes of disasters to help educate future disaster risk reduction experts, such as those taught in Huxley Disaster Reduction and Emergency Planning major.
“This is a critical time to assess impacts and investigate how improved development practices can speed Haiti’s recovery while reducing their vulnerability to the next earthquake or hurricane,” Green said.
Miles and Green also have assisted in Operation GEO-CAN (Global Earth Observation – Catastrophe Assessment Network) – a partnership of EERI, the World Bank, and other organizations. Through the initiative, volunteer engineers and disaster specialists scoured 15-centimeter resolution aerial imagery to identify collapsed and heavily damaged buildings. This assessment created one of the first comprehensive overviews of building damage across Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. Operation GEO-CAN, together with EERI’s Haiti reconnaissance report, will facilitate post-disaster needs assessment for the Haitian government and other partnering aid and development agencies.
Huxley College’s Resilience Institute seeks to create and disseminate practical knowledge and tools that promote resilience human and ecological communities in the context of natural hazard risk. The Institute has been involved with several notable case studies, including Lewis County flood impacts and recovery, risk reduction efforts in Guatemala City with Oxfam GB, and is currently doing research on small farm resilience, critical infrastructure restoration impacts on local economies, and emergency preparedness public education. For further information about the Institute and its work, please visit http://www.wwu.edu/resilience or contact Scott Miles.