Port-au-Prince Earthquake, 12 January 2010: Building Expertise Report
- The mission ran 5-9 February 2010, under a month after the earthquake, with the report delivered on 24 February.
- It is a contemporaneous engineering account of why specific buildings failed, recorded before demolition removed the evidence.
- Assessment begins with the National Palace and proceeds building by building.
- The report pairs technical findings with a section on the engineer's professional responsibility.
This is the technical record of an emergency structural mission conducted within weeks of the 12 January 2010 earthquake. Victor Davidovici, a consulting engineer specializing in earthquake engineering, travelled with the French interministerial mission from 5 to 9 February 2010 and reported on 24 February. The report is in two parts. The first states objectives and conclusions and includes a reflective section on the engineer's responsibility, opening with the question of how far one must understand error in order to reach truth. The second part is the emergency expertise itself: preliminary remarks on method, then building-by-building assessment, beginning with the National Palace of the Republic of Haiti. What makes the document valuable beyond its immediate purpose is that it is a contemporaneous engineering account of why particular Haitian buildings failed, written while the evidence was still standing and before demolition removed it. For an urban library it belongs with the building-regulation material rather than with the disaster response: the practical implication of the failures it documents is what construction rules and enforcement a rebuilt Port-au-Prince would need.
How to cite
Government of Haiti; Interministerial Committee for Territorial Planning (CIAT), Port-au-Prince Earthquake, 12 January 2010: Building Expertise Report, http://ciat.gouv.ht/sites/default/files/docs/Rapport%20d%27expertise%20des%20b%C3%A2timents%20Davidovici.pdf