Construction Standards for School Buildings

The construction standards Haitian school buildings are supposed to meet, issued by the school engineering directorate three years after the 2010 earthquake. It is a normative document, so its value is in the specificity of the thresholds rather than in any finding.

Siting rules come first and are written as exclusions: not on former dumps, because of explosion, fire and contamination risk; not on liquefaction-prone ground, waterlogged, poorly drained or floodable land, or soils of fine and uniform grain size; and trees kept at a distance of at least 1.5 times their adult height from buildings. Ground should be flat or gently sloping under 2 percent, and at most 4 percent where that is impossible.

The rest sets the dimensions that determine whether a school works. Free opening area in classrooms must be at least 25 percent of floor area; claustra voids at least 50 percent of classroom floor area; roof ventilation area above 15 percent of roof area; openings oriented south and north, perpendicular to the mean wind direction, with leeward openings oversized relative to windward ones by at least 25 percent. Canteens are sized on a rotation rate of 3, meaning 30 minutes per child between 11:45 and 13:15, so 240 diners require 80 seats. Accessibility is specified to the centimetre: running gradients at or below 5 percent with cross-slopes under 2 percent, and exceptional gradients of 7 percent for at most 5 metres, 8 percent for 2 metres and 12 percent for 50 centimetres.