This past February, AIDG gave Haitian solar start-up, ENERSA, a $15,000 emergency loan to help it rebuild its factory damaged in the January 12 earthquake that rocked the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area.
Duration: 2 minutes 14 seconds
Before the quake struck, Enersa was the fastest growing solar company in Haiti, with contracts in all 10 departments and installations in 58 cities and remote villages. The 2 and a half year old company is the brainchild of Haitian born Jean Ronel Noël and Alex Georges who met in graduate school in Montreal while pursuing degrees in mechanical engineering and business administration. In 2000, the two decided they needed to return to Haiti to start a business that could create positive change in their home country.
Enersa’s product line includes solar street lighting, residential and commercial solar systems, and solar chargers for smaller devices like cell phones and lamps. They initially settled on LED streetlights as a flagship product after seeing Japanese company Nichia’s white LEDs in action on Montreal’s streets. The big question for them at the time was what would they use as an energy source if they wanted to port this technology to Haiti. Haiti’s electricity infrastructure was notoriously unreliable in urban zones and nonexistent in rural areas. However, the country’s location in the sun-drenched tropics and the relatively modest energy requirements of LED systems made solar an attractive option for the Enersa team, if a suitable price point could be reached.
In steps Richard Comp of Maine Solar and Skyheat who would come to be Noel and Georges’ mentor. He introduced the team to methods of solar fabrication including inexpensive ways of encapsulating PV cells. Through Skyheat, Comp has trained teams in Mali, Nicaragua, Haiti and Peru in small-scale solar panel manufacturing.
AIDG first learned about Enersa when our Executive Director, Peter Haas met Noel and Georges at the Inter-American Development Bank Haiti Business forum in Port-au-Prince last September.
“I was immediately impressed by [Noel] an engineer who taught himself the electrical engineering he was missing by using the free online engineering resources of MIT Opencourseware from Port Au Prince,” says Haas. “Also, after seeing the dramatic bootstrapping JR and Alex had done in starting their business, it was clear this team was different.”
My interaction with JR last week during a tour of the damaged Enersa facility reinforced that impression. Though the factory had sustained much damage — several collapsed interior and exterior walls, JR was optimistic about the company’s outlook. With the help of our emergency funding and some smart maneuvering, he expected to be back in production in a few short weeks. Enersa was lucky in that all their employees were safely accounted for and little of their inventory was damaged. Their latest shipment of solar cells had been safe in Miami at the time of the disaster.
In our chat, Noël stressed the importance of creating jobs in Haiti. He believes that for Haiti to flourish, enjoy sustained growth and ultimately transition into a developed nation, businesses need to create local employment opportunities. So rather than simply importing completed panels and lights, Enersa imports the basic building blocks and employs local youth for production and installation. In their solar streetlights for example, the small panel, LED lights and towers are all made in Haiti. The company’s 18 fully qualified solar technicians, all capable of installing solar streetlights and photovoltaic home systems, are from Port-au-Prince largest shantytown, Cité Soleil. An added benefit of local production, Noel added, is that their completed panels are also 25% cheaper. Double win.
Enersa’s client focus for the near future will be NGOs and private companies in Haiti who need reliable access to electricity and want to support a socially responsible local business.
To contact Enersa, please email enersahaiti {at] gmail (dot}com.
This project was the brainchild of Luc Castera, a Haitian born entrepreneur who also lives here in Arlington. He saw my videos on YouTube and thought my message would be an encouragement to those affected by the earthquake.
Luc has arranged for the video to be dubbed into Haitian Creole and shown as part of the Cinema Underthe Stars, a mobile outdoor movie theater that brings entertainment and inspiration to rural Haitian communities.
Our amputee video will be shown to tens of thousands of Haitians during 260 showings in 52 communities on Cinema Under the Stars’ current tour.
10 Engineers Provide “Emergency Engineering Support” in Response to the Haiti Earthquake
From the Preliminary MCEER-AIDG Team Report (University of Buffalo)
On Thursday, January 21, 2010, MCEER director Andre Filiatrault led a team of 10 French-speaking engineers to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Their mission was to assess the safety of buildings – principally, hospitals and food storage facilities – damaged by the January 12, 7.0M earthquake. The “Emergency Engineering Support” effort was initiated by the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG) on behalf of the United Nations. It was quickly joined by MCEER, with the University at Buffalo-based Center playing the pivotal role in the recruitment, selection and deployment of the initial structural engineering team. The seven-day mission was critical to easing the delivery of medical services, food and water to the Haitian people. Perhaps more importantly, it laid a foundation for a more sustainable UN effort to continue the evaluation of an estimated 100,000 damaged structures still standing in Port-au-Prince.
MCEER-AIDG Emergency Engineering Support Unit get debriefed by Andrew Morton, UNEP
Dubbed the “Emergency Engineering Support Unit”, by UN officials, the team was stationed at the United Nations Stabilization Mission In Haiti (MINUSTAH), adjacent to the Port-au-Prince airport. Members included Andre Filiatrault (MCEER, University at Buffalo), team leader; Reginald DesRoches (Georgia Institute of Technology), Caroline Zennie (Parsons Corporation), Scott DeHollander (MRB Group), Wassim Ghannoum (University of Texas), Eddy Germain (New Jersey Department of Transportation), Dan Gregory (Green Energy Corporation), Gabrielle Rigaud (Tufts University), Jean-Philippe Simon (U.S. Department of Defense), and Vladimir Charles (Second Floor Studios).
The team followed ATC-20-1 (Applied Technology Council-20-1: Field Manual: Postearthquake Safety Evaluation of Buildings) tagging procedures:
INSPECTED (Green): Appears safe for lawful occupancy;
LIMITED ENTRY/RESTRICTED USE (Yellow): Limited entry/use, controlled by building owner/manager;
UNSAFE (Red): No entry unless controlled by jurisdiction.
ATC donated 15 field manuals and condensed instruction materials to the effort.
Upon arriving at the UN compound, the team met with relief officials to recommend and establish a protocol to field and fulfill inspection requests. They created a special email address (EES-Haiti [at}hotmail {dot] com) and a database to log requests and monitor the inspection process to completion. Included for each facility are its GPS coordinates, assigned ATC-20-1 placards, and hyperlinks to corresponding ATC-20-1 evaluation reports and building photos, among other relevant information. These procedures have been adopted by the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), which will continue to direct emergency engineering support going forward.
Entering World Food Program Shodecosa Warehouse
Delmas 2 Warehouse
One troubling aspect to the team was the realization that many hospitals and other critical facilities that remained undamaged following the earthquake were going unused as Haitians feared they would collapse from aftershocks. Consequently, medical procedures were being conducted outdoors, and a good deal of food and water needed for the relief, was going undistributed.
In addition to hospitals and food storage facilities, team members also assessed stability of other infrastructure including government buildings, UN buildings, embassies, and NGO headquarters. In all, they inspected 115 buildings.
The collapsed Ministry of Justice
Inside the basement
MCEER’s director, Andre Filiatrault, inspects the collapsed Ministry of Justice to determine whether it is safe enough to enter the basement to extract important legal records.
Their volunteer efforts took place under the guidance of representatives from the United Nations Development Programme, Food for Health International, and other AIDG humanitarian partner organizations, that escorted them through the various inspection sites in Haiti. At times they traveled under the protection of UN forces.
Upon return to the U.S. the members of the team expressed how they were moved by the experience and the plight of the Haitian people. They are proud of the contributions they made to help speed relief at a time when it was needed most. All agree that they are changed by the experience, and now share a special bond.
Members of the AIDG-MCEER “Emergency Engineering Support” team pose together before their return from Port-au-Prince. They are (standing l to r): Andre Filiatrault, team leader; Jean-Philippe Simon, Reginald DesRoches, Dan Gregory, Scott DeHollander, Gabrielle Rigaud, Vladimir Charles, Eddy Germain, Caroline Zennie; (front) Wassim Ghannoum.
The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) is continuing “Emergency Engineering Support” activities, which may take several months to complete. Those interested to volunteering their expertise to this continuing effort should contact:
Felipe Munevar
Manager a.i.
UNOPS
Haiti Project Centre
5, Impasse Delvime, rue Daniel Brun
Bois Moquette, Petion-Ville, Haiti
Tel. (509) 25 13 17 08 or (509) 25 13 17 09
Cell: (509) 37 02 35 36
E-mail: felipem {at] unops [dot} org
UNOPS website: www.unops.org
Additional Information
View larger map
Work in Progress: This is a partial list of structures inspected by AIDG’s earthquake and structural engineering volunteer teams. The color of the pointers indicate the placard assigned by the inspecting team. Green pointers means the structure was inspected and appears safe for lawful occupancy. Yellow indicates that use or entry into the building should be limited or restricted. Red means the building is unsafe and should not be entered unless controlled by jurisdiction. We’re currently working with volunteers, including Far McKon of Philly hackerspace Hive76 to create more interactive maps of this dataset.
1. Everything I learned about how to react during an earthquake from growing up in California does not apply in developing countries. Forget standing in the doorway. Get outside and get outside fast.
Apartment Building on Delmas 33
Partially Collapsed building on Delmas 33
2. You can be in an impromptu IDP camp, your world can be turned upside down, but if your family is safe, you still can find happiness.
We (Marc Orel, Sasha Kramer, Wisnel Jolissaint, Paul Christian and myself) drove down to Port-au-Prince from Cap a few days after the quake. Our second stop after dropping off our things at Matthew 25 house and picking up our friends Elie and Berto was Jacquet where we found Marc Orel’s family all safely accounted for.
3. Humanitarian responses are far more chaotic then you would ever believe and logisticians are totally underappreciated.
A chaotic health cluster meeting at MINISTAH Log Base
In the early stages of the humanitarian responses, aid workers crowded in this room to get reasonable high-speed internet access. Télécoms Sans Frontières were responsible for setting up the internet.
4. Stories of looting and violence however rare are news. Stories of people banding together to help their communities however common are human interest pieces. TV news by design does not show a representative sample of life on the ground. It only shows what reporters think will maintain viewer interest and ratings with far too little regard of the larger scale effects that such practices will have on society at large.
Inside St Claire’s soup kitchen. After hearing so much about the trouble the larger agencies and NGOs were having with large scale food distributions, Sasha and I were very surprised when we visited this well organized and peaceful soup kitchen at St Claire. This feeding program, which has been in operation for 9 years, has been serving 2,500 to 5,000 people a day since the earthquake, according to Lavarice Gaudin. Though Father Gerard Jean Juste, a strong advocate of liberation theology who headed the church, passed last May, his staff and partners try to “carry on his legacy” of serving the poor.
Community members unload food to be distributed to sick patients and IDPs in soccer field behind Matthew 25 House.
Photo by Elie Happel
5. Music, art, and play are more important in crisis situations than people fully acknowledge. It takes more that food and water to nourish the human spirit.
Our friend Rosemond Jolissaint, serenades a small crowds before he and friends and family members are evacauted to Cap Haitien from Pap. (I’ll try to post an mp3 of my favorite song of his later).
Girl jumping rope at St Claire
6. People will allow you to take their photograph even when in despair if they think the story of their pain will help others or serve the greater good.
Mother and child at the field hospital at MINUSTAH logbase
7. There is no UN agency charged to deal with engineering issues before and after disasters in the same way that say the World Food Program or the World Health Organization deal with food and health respectively.
Engineering team inspects Matthew 25 House
Part of AIDG’s response to the crisis has been to recruit earthquake and structural engineers to assess buildings on the ground in Port-au-Prince. The 2 teams, one fielded in close cooperation with the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research at the University of Buffalo, assessed nearly 200 government buildings, schools, orphanages, residences and food distribution warehouses during their stay in Port-au-Prince. Above MCEER’s director, Andre Filiatrault, inspects the collapsed Ministry of Justice to determine whether it is safe enough to enter the basement to extract important legal records. I’ll be writing a lot more about these fantastic engineers in future posts.
8. You can ride in the back of a pickup in the middle of Champ Mars and not get mobbed or shot at or caught in a riot. I’m talking to you CNN. Their reporting, which largely misrepresented the situation here, is a big reason why some teams of foreign American doctors are not allowed outside the gates of the General Hospital without escort.
Dr Steven Keller in the back of the SOIL truck on his way to a community hospital.
9. Fate has a sick sense of humor.
The Petionville Club. Private Club. Members Only
Internally displaced persons camp at the Petionville Golf, Tennis and Country Club.
10. Even when the apocalypse comes, life goes on…
Having a friend braid your hair
and on…
Friends in Cap: Magistrat Jhonny Estimable (Mayor or Borgne and brother of AIDG’s Edline Estimable), Tony (SOIL), Paul Christian Namphy (SOIL, Oxfam), Marc Orel (SOIL), and ?
I haven’t been able to write about what’s happening here. Thinking too deeply about it all makes it too overwhelming. Below our good friend, Sasha Kramer from our long-time partner organization in Haiti SOIL, writes about the situation on the ground.
Port au Prince, Haiti, Jan. 19 – This afternoon, feeling helpless, we decided to take a van down to Champs Mars, the area around the palace, to look for people needing medical care to bring to Matthew 25, the guesthouse where we are staying which has been transformed into a field hospital. Since we arrived in Port au Prince, everyone has told us that you cannot go into the area around the palace because of violence and insecurity.
I was in awe as we walked into downtown among the flattened buildings in the shadow of the fallen palace. Amongst the swarms of displaced people, there was calm and solidarity. We wound our way through the camp asking for injured people who needed to get to the hospital.
Despite everyone telling us that as soon as we did this we would be mobbed by people, I was amazed: As we approached each tent, people gently pointed us toward their neighbors, guiding us to those who were suffering the most. We picked up five badly injured people and drove towards an area where Ellie and Berto had passed a woman earlier.
When they saw her, she was lying on the side of the road with a broken leg screaming for help. As they were on foot, they could not help her at the time, so we went back to try to find her. Incredibly we found her relatively quickly at the top of a hill of shattered houses. The sun was setting and the community helped to carry her down the hill on a refrigerator door. Tough looking guys smiled in our direction calling out, “Bonswa, cherie” (Good evening, my dear) and “Kouraj” (Courage).
When we got back to Matthew 25, it was dark and we carried the patients back into the soccer field-tent village-hospital where the team of doctors had been working tirelessly all day. Although they had officially closed down for the evening, they agreed to see the patients we had brought.
Once our patients were settled in, we came back into the house to find the doctors amputating a foot on the dining room table. The patient lay calmly, awake but far away under the fog of ketamine. Half way through the surgery, we heard a clamor outside and ran out to see what it was.
A large yellow truck was parked in front of the gate and rapidly unloading hundreds of bags of food over our fence. The hungry crowd had already begun to gather and in the dark it was hard to decide how to best distribute the food.
Knowing that we could not sleep in the house with all of this food and so many starving people in the neighborhood, our friend Amber, who is experienced in food distribution, snapped into action and began to get everyone in the crowd into a line that stretched down the road. We braced ourselves for the fighting that we had heard would come but, in a miraculous display of restraint and compassion, people lined up to get the food and one by one the bags were handed out without a single serious incident.
During the food distribution, the doctors called to see if anyone could help to bury the amputated leg in the backyard. As I have no experience with food distribution, I offered to help with the leg. I went into the back with Ellie and Berto and we dug a hole and placed the leg in it, covering it with soil and cement rubble.
By the time we got back into the house, the food had all been distributed and the patient, Anderson, was waking up. The doctors asked for a translator, so I went and sat by his stretcher explaining to him that the surgery had gone well and he was going to live. His family had gone home and he was alone, so Ellie and I took turns sitting with him as he came out from under the drugs.
I sat and talked to Anderson for hours as he drifted in and out of consciousness. At one point one of the Haitian men working at the hospital came in and leaned over Anderson and said to him in Kreyol: “Listen, man: Even if your family could not be here tonight, we want you to know that everyone here loves you. We are all your brothers and sisters.”
Cat and I have barely shed a tear through all of this – the sky could fall and we would not bat an eye – but when I told her this story this morning, the tears just began rolling down her face, as they are mine as I am writing this. Sometimes it is the kindness and not the horror that can break the numbness that we are all lost in right now.
So don’t believe Anderson Cooper when he says that Haiti is a hotbed for violence and riots. It is just not the case. In the darkest of times, Haiti has proven to be a country of brave, resilient and kind people and it is that behavior that is far more prevalent than the isolated incidents of violence.
Please pass this on to as many people as you can so that they can see the light of Haiti cutting through the darkness, the light that will heal this nation.
We are safe. We love you all and I will write again when I can. Thank you for your generosity and compassion.
Three and a half weeks may have passed, but the situation on the ground is still much the same as what is shown in this photo series. The major differences are that the search and rescue operations have come to a close. The field hospital at MINUSTAH logbase where much triage of earthquake victims was occurring has also closed. The type of medical personnel needed on the ground has shifted. Initially surgeons, especially orthopedic surgeons, were in high demand to deal with trauma, fractures and amputations. Now many of these patients require post-operative care. The 1000+ amputees will require intense physical therapy. An untold number will need grief counseling. Many doctors have answered the call, including my good friend Dr. Megan Coffee, who is manning the TB tent at the general hospital (see Haiti Hospital’s Fight Against TB Falls to One Man in NYTimes). Unfortunately, nurses who spend much more time delivering care to individual patients than doctors ever can are in short supply. As we move out of the early phase of the post-earthquake response, infectious diseases ranging from diarrheal diseases to tuberculosis are becoming a grave concern. Most of the remains of quake victims that are visible (i.e. not under rubble) have been cleared, burned or buried. Many will never find the bodies of their loved ones to give them a proper burial.
“Earthquakes don’t kill people,” says John Mutter, a seismologist and disaster expert at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. “Bad buildings kill them.” And Haiti had some of the worst buildings in world. There are building codes, but in a country that has been ranked as the 10th most corrupt in the world, enforcement is lax at best. The concrete blocks used to construct buildings in the capital are often handmade, and are of wildly varying quality. “In Haiti a block is maybe an eighth of the weight of a concrete block that you’d buy in the U.S.,” says Peter Haas, the executive director of the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG), an NGO that has worked on buildings in Haiti. “You end up providing buildings quickly and cheaply but at great risk.”
Compared to the sensationalist reporting and scaremongering from other major news organizations, Amy Goodman and her team covered the situation on the ground with a great deal of sensitivity. I very much appreciate their balanced reporting as a counterpoint to dominant narrative being put forward at the time by CNN.
There are also significant problems with the quality of building materials used, says Peter Haas, head of the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, a US-based non-profit group that has been working in Haiti since 2006.
“People are skimping on cement to try to cut costs, putting a lot of water in, building too thin, and you end up with a structure that’s innately weaker,” said Mr Haas, who was on his way to Haiti to help assess the safety of damaged buildings.
“Concrete blocks are being made in people’s backyards and dried out in the sun,” he said.
Mr Haas said there were also “serious problems” with the enforcement of building codes in Haiti.
He said the government did not function at all in several parts of the country, and many communities lacked basic services such as electricity, sanitation services or access to clean water.
“So the problem of code enforcement is low down on the list,” he said.
At the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, a small nonprofit organization in San Francisco, projects are also developed from the ground up by providing support to local entrepreneurs, said Peter Haas, its founder.
Mr. Haas spoke while traveling to Haiti, where, before the earthquake, his group had been set to announce a competition for local entrepreneurs to develop plans for infrastructure projects. The competition has been delayed, and the group has added a new category: earthquake-resistant housing.
In Haiti, Mr. Haas’s group has already been helping Coopen, a business cooperative in Cap Haitien that will collect organic waste and human waste from public toilets and convert it to biogas, a fuel, for cooking. And in Guatemala, the group has aided a small company, XelaTeco, that builds hydroelectric projects for rural villages.
“We’re really not trying to dump some new expert solution on the population,” Mr. Haas said. Working through local businesses, he said, ensures that ideas that do not work do not stay around. “If a business fails and the market doesn’t accept the product, it disappears,” he said.
In a telephone interview, Haas warned that victims of the earthquake are fanning out from the capital to smaller centers across the country, raising the potential for problems beyond Port-au-Prince. To avoid a long-term refugee crisis, he said, the central government and its international supporters must help not only victims in the capital but those who have fled elsewhere.
Haas estimated that several thousand people a day are arriving in Cap Haitien from the capital and are largely left to fend for themselves.
“I think the immediate concern is intake and tracking [the displaced] for support,’’ he said. “Then they can be moved to temporary shelters and more permanent residences.’’
He sees ways to combine the postquake relief work and the longer-term rebuilding. For example, he has been talking with a Virginia company called Shelter 2 Home that builds prefabricated shelters designed to serve as a refuge in a crisis and then be improved to become a permanent house.
Catherine Laine captured this scene among countless other similar while driving through Delmas 33, Port-au-Prince on January 16
Dear readers,
Here is a brief update on our activities in Haiti.
We have established an operations center in Cap-Haïtien with our partner SOIL to serve as a hub for coordinating volunteer efforts and supplies coming into the country, especially those coming in through the port of Cap-Haïtien and the Dominican Republic (one of the few open routes into Haiti these days). Our presence in the north, away from the destruction zone, has allowed our communication and logistic abilities to continue relatively intact, which has been extremely useful in coordinating efforts on the ground with other partners and aid groups.
As an immediate priority, we are recruiting and mobilizing teams of engineers and other technical experts to directly support relief efforts of key partners. As I write this, we are preparing to send our first teams of engineers into Haiti to support the medical response efforts of Partners in Health, an organization that, as we previously noted, is having a significant impact here. We are particularly interested at this moment in placing French or Creole speaking civil and structural engineers. If you are, or know, an engineer that might be interested in volunteering in Haiti, please send a resume or CV to helphaiti@aidg.org.
AIDG will also be helping to coordinate the distribution of a large number of cookstoves in affected areas. Even before this week’s disaster, AIDG was in discussions with several leading stove groups (including Prakti Design, WorldStove, and Trees Water People), and in fact had been planning to host these groups at a conference in Cap-Haïtien next week to strengthen our collaboration in Haiti. Our focus has obviously shifted in the past couple days, and the group is now mobilizing very quickly to bring in as many stoves as possible, while at the same time developing local manufacturing capacity.
Aside from these immediate response priorities, we are also already hard at work developing a longer term strategy for supporting reconstruction efforts in Haiti, including a collaboration with our friends Architecture for Humanity to promote the development of low cost earthquake resistant housing. More details on this will follow in the coming weeks.
As you can imagine, we have all available hands on deck right now to support the response in Haiti. But WE NEED YOUR HELP to make sure we have the resources to continue these efforts. These next weeks are critical for us and for Haiti, and we are asking you to make a donation, whatever you can, to support our work here. Every dollar helps, and every dollar will have an immediate and direct impact in the wake of this tragedy.
You can make a secure donation online here, or if you’d like to mail us a check, you can send it to the following address:
AIDG
P.O. Box 104
Weston, MA 02493
We can’t thank you enough for all of your support.
Quetsol is a new business that will provide high efficiency, low cost solar technologies that aim to increase access to basic illumination, electricity generation, and water pumping in Guatemala. Their mission is to help their clients save money and improve their quality of life through the use of appropriate technology.
At approximately 4:55 pm Eastern on Tuesday Port Au Prince experienced a magnitude 7.0 earthquake, with aftershocks of 5.9 and 5.7. There is widespread damage to infrastructure with numerous collapsed buildings. It is anticipated there will be a high casualty rate
The National Palace has collapsed (eyewitness photo)
The UN headquarters has been seriously damaged (source: UN)
The Hotel Montana has sustained collapse with 200 missing (source: associated press france)
A Hospital has collapsed (source:NYtimes)
We are currently developing opportunities for AIDG to aid in reconstruction with the help of partners. We will make another announcement on this shortly.
As you all know we are a small organization. We require some basic additional budget resources immediately to help run an assessment that will determine this longer term response aimed at infrastructure and reconstruction. If possible mail checks to:
AIDG
P.O. Box 104
Weston, MA 02493
We will actually receive these funds faster than online donations. We will be running a larger campaign in concert with our reconstruction announcement.
For those wishing to have an immediate direct impact on populations in Port Au Prince we are recommending supporting the medical response teams of Partners In Health. www.pih.org They are working with a field hospital set up by the UNDP that immediately needs pain meds, bandages and other medical supplies.
We ask you all to hold Haiti in your hearts and prayers as this tragedy unfolds.
