Proposal for Workshops in China on
Proper Construction Practices Awareness & Landslide Preparedness

•  Objectives

1. In cooperation with Sun Yat-sen University, we will train a group of students in the basics of proper nonengineered construction practices to enable them to teach workshops in the rural areas affected by the recent earthquake. In addition, the students will be trained to use morphological features to identify potential landslide hazards and will learn how to mitigate the risk.

2. Raise awareness among the rural population of the structural flaws of the traditional houses and simple ways to improve their seismic performance. These improvements should result in minimal additional cost—mainly additional labor—to the house owner, and they should be simple enough so that no additional skills will be needed to implement them. Also, the workshop will address the problem of potential landslides (where relevant) and provide a series of guidelines on how to identify and mitigate them.

•  Targeted Population

We will target the one group of people that usually does not get any significant support after this kind of disasters: the poor in rural areas who build their own houses. Therefore, we will concentrate mainly on stone and mud houses that the owners will end up retrofitting or rebuilding by themselves. Proper construction practices for brick and reinforced concrete structures are already well-known and understood, and their implementation or the lack thereof, is an economic question, not an awareness issue. After the initial training at the university campus we will go to remote villages where their populations will be mostly on their own to recover from the disaster and where they will have to use locally readily available materials to rebuild their houses.

•  Workshops

The workshops should be customized to the specific villages: Only the problems and solutions relevant to that a given village (or group of villages) should be addressed. Where possible, the instruction media should include pictures of the local structures to reinforce the link between what is presented and the reality.

The one-day workshop will consist of a theoretical and a hands-on session. The theory will be taught with the help of graphics, pictures, and structural models. It will present the basic deficiencies of their current construction practices and techniques to improve them. The workshops will have to be modified according to the needs of the different locations.

Small models will be used to explain:
-The need of bracing and strong connections
-The weakening effect of openings and opening distribution
-The use of rounded vs. rendered and big vs. small stones

In addition to addressing the structural deficiencies, the workshop should also prepare the villagers for the event that a landslide would occur. This will include: a safe location where to gather after the landslide, assigning 2-3 people responsible for calling the relevant emergency agency and organizing the first relief efforts. The hands-on session will be used to show how to implement the recommended improvements and convince the participants that they can do it by themselves. A short visit of local damaged structures will end the session.

•  Benefits

1. Academic : Training of domestic students in proper construction practices that then can be taught in workshops.
2. Awareness : Raising the awareness of villagers about building significantly more earthquake stable houses using construction techniques that are simple but effective and use locally available materials.
3. Sustainability : The fact that domestic students will learn the skills and that the techniques taught will be simple and effective, makes it possible to continue the workshops after I leave.
4. Targeting the most vulnerable: The poorest population groups in rural areas have been left out of a number of post-earthquake reconstruction programs. These workshops will ensure that a significant number of underserved communities will be covered.