PETER ARONSON: You’re listening to Housing Revolution — a series of interviews with innovators and revolutionaries from around the world who are working to make housing safer, more sustainable and better quality without significantly increasing costs. I’m Peter Aronson.

KIM GREEN: And I’m Kim Green. The past few years have been a bad time for earthquakes.

(EARTHQUAKE NEWS MONTAGE)

KIM: Turkey, Japan, Haiti, Sichuan — to name a few. More than 425 thousand people died in those temblors, and that’s just since 2008. But was it the earthquakes that actually killed those people? Or was it something else? Something preventable?

PETER: Our next guest, Dr. Elizabeth Hausler, believes earthquakes—

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: Earthquakes don’t kill people—poorly built buildings do.

PETER: She should know. Hausler’s been building things her whole life. She loved playing with construction toys as a little girl, then spent summers as a teenager working real construction with her dad, who was a brick mason. She went on to get a doctorate in civil engineering. Then she founded Build Change, a nonprofit social enterprise that designs earthquake-resistant houses and trains builders, engineers, homeowners, and government officials to build them. She works in the kinds of places you hear about on the news. Places that rack up horrific earthquake death tolls—in the tens of thousands.

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: We operate in Indonesia, China, and Haiti and overall, over 70,000 people are living in safer homes because of our work.

PETER: How did you get started in all this?

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: I was about halfway through graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, when there was an earthquake in Gujarat, India, in 2002, that killed about 20,000 people. When I was looking at why people were killed in that earthquake, it was because of the collapse of a poorly built building. So it’s not the earthquake that kills people, it’s a poorly designed and built building. It occurred to me that this is a man-made problem, so there must be a man-made solution. So I went to India on a Fulbright Fellowship to study and assist with the reconstruction after the earthquake.

PETER: Wow, we really tend to think of earthquake deaths as natural disasters, but you’re saying earthquake deaths, by and large, are a man-made problem. That’s quite a different perspective. And now your organization, Build Change, what does it do? Does it build houses that will withstand earthquakes?

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: Build change doesn’t build houses for people, but rather we train people to build them. We run training courses for everyone who is involved in construction: homeowners, builders, building materials producers, engineers who work for government as well as any relief agencies involved in reconstruction, and we also provide hands-on technical assistance directly to the homeowner as they build their house.

KIM: That’s great. But how are you gonna teach millions of people how to build a better house?

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: we also work from the top down, so in Haiti, especially, we are working in partnership with the Ministry of Public Works to develop and implement simple building standards for earthquake-and hurricane-resistant construction.

PETER: Can you talk a little bit about what actually happens to a house or residential building in an earthquake? What type of movements, what kinds of stresses it experiences, what actually happens to it?

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: Sure! Yeah! Masonry, you know, brick or concrete-block or stone masonry, is a very brittle material. So once it cracks, it’s probably going to collapse. There’s no capacity, really, for it to absorb energy. Right? These buildings can be very dangerous and very deadly and earthquakes if they’re not built well. So “confined masonry” is kind of an improvement on a masonry building – it basically takes reinforced concrete, columns and beams, and ties the masonry wall together. So if it cracks — a little bit — it won’t collapse, because it’s confined by these reinforced concrete elements.

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: It’s kind of like putting a rubber band around the building.

KIM: That’s, like, a really big rubber band.

PETER: You’re so literal sometimes! Use your imagination. Let’s say you want to make a building out of dice.

KIM: Out of dice?

Peter: Yeah. Normal, six-sided dice.

KIM: That doesn’t sound safe at all.

PETER: Just play along! So, if you pile up, say, five rows of dice, five high, those 25 dice form your typical brick wall, minus the mortar. A quick flick of the finger or a jolt to the table, and your wall of dice falls apart. Now, if you put a nice wide rubber band around the edge of your wall and jostle the table, your dice are still gonna fall, but they’ll probably fall together, as a single wall. Now imagine building 3 more walls of dice, each one held together by a rubber band. And you tie the 4 walls together at the corners. You can shake that table quite a lot before your dice-house starts to fall apart. And that’s basically the essence of confined masonry. Only instead of dice and rubber bands, it’s bricks and steel rebar covered with cement.

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: The thing is, if you build a confined masonry building correctly, it can do very well, but if you don’t follow these basic rules—you know, good quality masonry, and tying all of the elements together with good connections—then these kind of buildings can also collapse in earthquakes.

PETER: Let’s look at a specific case — what happened in Haiti?

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: So in Haiti, you had a very weak wall: concrete blocks that were not very strong and masonry workmanship that was not very good and then a heavy roof, a reinforced concrete slab roof. So a weak wall and a heavy roof, and when the earthquake happened, the wall is the first thing to kind of take the seismic load, so it cracks, and it becomes weak, and then it can’t hold up this heavy roof, so the whole building collapses.

PETER: Terrifying. Are there different types of quakes, or are all quakes the same, other than magnitude?

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: Well, there are different types of quakes just because there are different sources—the way the faults move against each other varies depending on where you are. I mean, in San Francisco and in Sumatra, most of the faults there are strike-slip, so there’s two plates moving side to side compared to each other, but then the earthquake that occurred in 2004 in the Indian Ocean that caused the tsunami, that was a subduction zone event, so you’ve got one plate that’s sliding underneath the other plate.

KIM: I had no idea there were multiple categories of earthquake badness.

PETER: Wait, it gets worse. We’re talking ‘soil-site amplification effects.’

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: Usually, if you have a very loose soil, especially one that’s saturated or a soft clay, maybe something that’s in a riverbed, or near the ocean, kind of a deep sediment, those types of soils will tend to amplify the motion and they will change it to by the time it gets to the building. Whereas if your building is sitting on rock, then the motion tends to be a higher frequency when it reaches the building, and so these kinds of soil-site amplification effects are taken into consideration when designing a building.

PETER: Are there sort of best and worst materials out there? I mean, from a seismic standpoint, what’s the best material—if money were no object, what’s the best thing to build from and what’s the worst thing to build from?

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: My preference would be to build with something that’s lightweight and flexible. That would be a timber frame or lightweight steel or that type of lightweight, flexible material. It would be better if people started to shift away from masonry systems. However, this is what people build with. And so Build Change’s philosophy is to make low- or no-cost improvements on existing methods, because it’s so much easier to get people to make small changes to what the builders already know how to build with, then it is to bring in something new.

KIM: Wow. I would think that masonry would be stronger than timber.

PETER: It’s like the parable about the reed and the oak. It’s not just about strength. It’s about flexibility.

KIM: But what about deforestation? Global warming? Sounds like we’re gonna be cutting down a whole lot more trees.

PETER: We’re getting to that—

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: In Indonesia, we work with a lot of families who are building out of timber frame. And that’s easier to do in parts of Indonesia, because timber is a lot more readily available and it’s a common building technology that people have been using for hundreds of years and also, many people who have built masonry homes in Indonesia have seen them collapse in an earthquake and their neighbors’ timber house is just fine, so they’ve kind of gone back from masonry to timber. But Indonesia is a little bit unique, in that there is still timber that’s readily accessible. Most of the developing world, timber is not really accessible anymore, so people have shifted to more cement-based and masonry-based technologies. Also, in a lot of the areas that we work, these types of buildings are perceived to be more modern, more secure, difficult to break into, and easier to maintain. So there are cultural preferences to these types of materials as well.

Peter: How do you make the cost of earthquake-resistant construction competitive with the cheaper building methods that people are already using, like bricks and cement?

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: That’s a good question, and that’s a tough thing to do. In Indonesia, it’s not so difficult when people shift to timber. Because if you are building a house out of maybe some recycled or reused timber or mostly new timber, it’s still less expensive than building a confined masonry building according to minimum standards for earthquake safety. So there, it’s no problem.
But in a place like Haiti or China, where people are building unreinforced masonry and we’re trying to get them to shift to confined masonry, you’re adding concrete and steel, and that’s definitely going to increase the cost. So you have to really evaluate: What is the minimum that needs to be done in order to make the building earthquake resistant, and so Build Change partners with structural engineering firms and research institutions in the countries that we work to do small-scale as well as large-scale on these type of buildings to be able to reduce the costs of the building without reducing the safety or the standard to which the building is designed. Let me give you an example about this: in Indonesia, if people are building confined masonry, they’re using fired bricks. But the bricks themselves are not very strong. They’re not fired at a very high temperature. They’re kind of fired in these rural kilns which use brush or rice husk as the fuel, and so the bricks aren’t very strong, and they’re very porous. And it’s very hot in Indonesia. So if you lay the bricks dry, then the bricks will absorb the water out of the mortar before the cement has time to hydrate and create a good bond. But if you soak the bricks in water before you build the wall, we’ve done some very simple experiments that show you can double the strength of the wall! So here you need a bucket—

KIM: Hold it right there. A bucket of water. Just by dunking the bricks in a bucket of water… you can double the strength of the wall? That’s unbelievable.

PETER: Yeah. It’s incredible!

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: —It’s amazing! And you just need a bucket and water. So it’s just a matter of a bucket, and getting the builders to actually take the time to do this properly.

PETER: Wow. So would you say soaking bricks in water right before laying them is the one single biggest impact thing people could do to make their buildings more earthquake-safe?

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: In Indonesia, that’s definitely one of the biggest things for confined masonry. We have some simple posters on our website. There is one that gives the six things that you could do to make your confined masonry building—if you could just do these six things, it will make it so much better, and that’s one of them.

KIM: So, what are the six things?

PETER: If you want to check them out in detail, go to our website, HousingRevolution.org. Some of the things are all about the bones of the building—going back to the dice-and-rubber band example—like making sure to connect steel beams together at the corners. But some of them are incredibly simple things. Although not so simple to fix, sometimes for cultural reasons. Take Indonesia–

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: In Indonesia, there is a strong cultural preference to have large doors and windows at the front of the house. And that can make a masonry building very weak. And so what you find in a lot of earthquakes in Indonesia is at the front of the building collapses, but that the back of it, where the bedrooms are—where they have several walls and smaller openings—the back of the building’s usually fine.

PETER: And I don’t suppose you can just say, “Hey, don’t put big doors and windows at the front of your house”—

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: They’re not gonna do that! Because this is the culture, and in the rural areas, people don’t have air conditioning, so you need sort of big openings in the front for ventilation and for natural light and that sort of thing. So we have to think of something else. What we recommend is putting reinforcement over the windows and doors, tying them into the columns at either end and that can definitely improve the performance of these types of buildings in an earthquake.

PETER: It doesn’t sound like construction methods have to be modified so dramatically in order to make buildings more earthquake safe. So I’m just wondering why we haven’t seen these methods adopted on a larger scale—on a worldwide scale. What stands in the way of widespread adoption of earthquake-resistant construction techniques?

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: I think like almost any development challenge out there it comes down to money, technology, and people. Right? If people don’t have enough money to build an earthquake-resistant building, they won’t do it. And it does cost a little bit more to implement these kind of building standards.

PETER: Like how much more?

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: Ten to 20 percent, depending on where you are and your starting point. If you are already building confined masonry, it’s just a matter of connecting things together better — the cost is less than 5%. I mean, it’s really not that much money, but, you know, we’re talking about rural areas in developing countries where people don’t have sufficient financial resources for this type of thing, so—

PETER: So… how can people be enticed or encouraged to build safer houses?

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: In a post-disaster context, it’s so helpful and important that aid agencies who are providing money for reconstruction require people to meet a standard before they are able to access the funding.

PETER: In other words, people need a little push to spend the extra money — they may be able to afford it, but might not see the value in spending more. So aid agencies can make funding contingent on earthquake safe construction. What else?

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: there’s just a massive need to train builders about these new techniques, engineers, all construction professionals. In China, we’ve been working there since shortly after the May 12, 2008 earthquake, and if you look around the area that was affected, you would have found—lots of collapsed buildings, but you also found several buildings that did not collapse, that were built recently according to recent seismic codes in China. So in China, the codes are there. It’s just a matter of getting that information out to people in the rural areas who maybe don’t have the same access to that kind of information that people do in the urban areas.
And so we spent a lot of time trying to simplify the Chinese codes and explain them in very simple terms to the homeowners and the builders who were rebuilding in the rural areas. So it’s a matter of getting the technology out to the people.
And then someone’s got to want the house to be earthquake resistant. So that can be either the homeowner, who, especially after an earthquake, when they’ve seen their house collapse, they may have lost a family member, they are eager for more information on how to rebuild safely—

PETER: So what you’re saying is it takes a disaster literally hitting home to get people to see the value of spending that extra little bit on earthquake-safe construction.

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: But it would be so much easier and better if the government were enforcing the building standards, so again we work from the top down as well, to try to work with governments so that they have easy-to-use, simple building standards and we to help them supplement their capacity to inspect buildings.
So it all comes down to money, technology, and people, and if we can overcome those three obstacles, then we can create large-scale change.

PETER: How can you be so sure? I mean, is there any evidence that your approach works to change building habits?

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: We’ve seen that happen in Indonesia. We went back to some of the areas that we hadn’t visited in a while because we wrapped up our program there in 2008 and left, and then there was another earthquake. And when we went back to those areas in 2009, we found new homes being built with the same techniques we had taught people in our program. We weren’t there anymore. The builders and the homeowners were taking these changes forward themselves. And so that’s kind of the long-term change that Build Change is going for.

PETER: Pretty earth-shaking stuff.

KIM: Yeah, that had to feel good.

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: Oh, I was delighted! I was so happy! I mean, that’s really what Build Change’s long-term goal is. My dream is that people build earthquake-resistant houses on their own. And that it just becomes common, it just becomes the way people build.

KIM: This is Housing Revolution! You’ve been listening to an interview with Dr. Elizabeth Hausler! earthquake engineer… skilled brickmason… and the founder of Build Change, a nonprofit that helps teach low-cost, earthquake-resistant construction techniques. For more information on those techniques, visit our website, housingrevolution.org.

PETER: Hey, actually maybe it’s too late in the show, but Elizabeth Hausler was saying she wanted to add one more thing.

KIM: Let’s hear it!

DR. ELIZABETH HAUSLER: Build Change is expanding significantly right now, and we’ve got a lot of job opportunities. So I don’t know if that’s appropriate and something that you might be able to include —

PETER: I think we can let you have that plug. Build Change is hiring! We have a link to their jobs page on our website, HousingRevolution.org. Speaking of which, here’s a plug of our own: Our website and this podcast are put together without any commercial sponsors or grants at all… nada… zilch… so if we are going to get any funding at all, it’s going to come from you, Listener. No pressure or anything, but we are depending on you for our very existence.

KIM: I’m gonna cut Peter off before he gets any more dramatic. Please make a contribution to support the Housing Revolution — just go to HousingRevolution.org and click donate. It’s quick and easy. And it’s a great way to foment.

PETER: Until next time, I’m Peter Aronson

KIM: and I’m Kim Green for Housing Revolution, saying

PETER & KIM: “Foment!”