Development & Aid, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

DEVELOPMENT: Haiti Must Destroy Before Rebuilding

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Mar 22 2010 (IPS) - When the Jan. 12 earthquake struck this mountainous country, in less than a minute, it transformed it from one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere to the largest construction site this side of the Atlantic.

As Haiti’s leaders unveiled a 14-billion-dollar reconstruction plan, international excavation, logistics, transportation and construction companies have lined up for contracts to rebuild the thousands of commercial and residential properties that were destroyed during the seismic shocks that left more than 200,000 dead and about a million people homeless.

Three model homes – two simple wood-frame structures with corrugated roofs and another with a steel frame – have been put on display by the Red Cross and Red Crescent societies near the airport. The groups say they are ready to start construction immediately, but have nowhere to build.

Another group, Danish People’s Aid, has put up four simple wooden houses in the hard-hit Carrefour area, where it hopes to build 500 more.

But before Haiti and international donors can rebuild this devastated city, they must first destroy it.

The task of knocking down, smashing apart and hauling away the mountain of rubble will take years and cost as much as one billion dollars, according to some estimates.

“I have heard the president say that based on what the engineers tell him, it will take 1,000 dump trucks working for 1,000 days to clear away the debris, and I am not sure even the experts know how big is the pile,” said Leslie Voltaire, an architect and diplomat who is a member of the reconstruction team.

What the experts do know is that the rubble is very heavy and very much in the way. U.N. rapid assessment teams estimate that the 245,000 ruined or hopelessly damaged structures in Haiti will produce 30 million to 78 million cubic yards of broken blocks, twisted metal and pulverised concrete – enough to fill the Louisiana Superdome, from playing field to roof, up to 17 times.

U.S. and other international contractors with experience clearing Baghdad after bombings and the U.S. city of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina recognise that there is lots of money to be made carting off Haiti’s debris. They are scrambling to partner with local construction firms to secure access to workers and heavy equipment and to align themselves with the Haitian business leaders who have connections to the government and the international donor consortiums that will write the big cheques.

President René Préval might have been overly optimistic about the 1,000 days. If a Mack truck can haul about nine cubic yards of concrete debris, the cleanup could require as many as eight million trips – through the snarl of downtown Port-au-Prince’s narrow streets to the still-nonexistent dumps and recycling centers at the city’s edge.

“How long did it take to remove the twin towers after 9/11? It took them two years, and that was in New York City, and it cost a lot of money. We are Port-au-Prince, and our government doesn’t have any money,” said Philippe Cineas, director general of Haiti Blocs, a concrete-block maker and construction company that has cleared rubble from five sites, including a bank “where we had to work very slowly, very carefully, because they were looking for the vault.”

The Haitian government, using funds from the international community, has targeted only a handful of sites, beginning with schools, hospitals and public offices, where large numbers of people might still be buried. It has also begun to topple a few larger, listing buildings that are in danger of sudden collapse.

Some private companies and individuals have paid to have debris cleared in order to get back to work or to recover the dead. Only a few homeowners have started to dig out.

Dismantling a single large building can cost 20,000 to 80,000 dollars, said Reynold Bonnefil, president of Haytian Tractor, whose firm controls 90 percent of the Caterpillar excavator market.

Funding for the billion-dollar demolition will likely include the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank. It is one of the crucial decisions that will be made leading up to a major U.N.-led donor conference at the end of this month.

Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and a U.N. consultant, said that typically, a tragedy such as this is followed by international pledges of billions of dollars, but then only a slow trickle of help. The government of Haiti, overwhelmed long before this earthquake, is in no position to pester 20 or more complicated donor agencies to follow up on designing projects and disbursing funds, Sachs said.

According to Sachs, the commercial and residential shelters must not be makeshift units that would be destroyed by Haiti’s frequent floods, landslides and hurricanes.

The country will need a revived and expanded construction industry to produce the brick, reinforced concrete and other vital materials. Private companies, domestic and international, should be contracted to set up operations.

Still, the demand for real estate and civil engineering expertise is only expected to increase in Haiti as the attention shifts towards permanent reconstruction, and some development agencies have been calling for care to be taken to avoid slapdash construction fuelled by the haste to house the homeless – such as happened after the disastrous Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004.

*Special to IPS from the Haitian Times