Engineering Researcher Part of National Team Investigating Haiti Earthquake

Civil engineering professor and earthquake expert Brady Cox will travel to Haiti Saturday, Jan. 30, as part of a national team of engineers who will study the effects of the massive earthquake that struck the small Caribbean nation on Jan. 12. Cox and seven other members of Geo-engineering Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER), an organization funded by the National Science Foundation to conduct reconnaissance efforts of extreme events such as earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes, will gather data to advance understanding of earthquakes and their engineering effects.
Cox is an expert in soil dynamics and geotechnical engineering. He will help the GEER team examine the earthquake’s effect on buildings, bridges, utilities and ports. Ultimately, this research will contribute to the design of structures that can respond to the violent effects of earthquakes without failing and possibly save human lives.
The GEER team will be led by Ellen Rathje, professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas. The researchers will be in Haiti for a week.
Cox suspects that Haiti, one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world, does not have or does not enforce seismic building codes to mitigate the effects of large earthquakes. The recent earthquake – which measured 7.0 magnitude and whose epicenter was only 10 miles west of Port-au-Prince, the nation’s densely populated capital – caused massive destruction and killed thousands of Haitians. An estimated 150,000 people have died as a result of the earthquake.
Cox would not speculate on how many lives could have been saved if buildings in Port-au-Prince and other towns had been built with properly designed, reinforcing steel to help structures absorb the effects of an earthquake. However, without directly comparing one earthquake to another, he said that much could be learned from the 1994 Northridge, Calif., earthquake, which registered a magnitude of 6.7. In addition to their proximity in magnitude, the events were similar in that they were both relatively shallow earthquakes that affected densely populated areas. Despite these similarities, the earthquake that hit Northridge, where contractors have had to follow earthquake-building codes for many years, killed only 61 people.

Cox specializes in geotechnical engineering issues related to earthquake loading, soil dynamics and nondestructive material characterization using stress waves. He participated in previous GEER deployments immediately following the 2008, magnitude 6.9 earthquake in Iwate-Miyagi, Japan, and the 2007, magnitude 8.0 earthquake in Pisco, Peru.