GOOD Practice! Ye Zhiping

Thanks to the New York Times for its excellent coverage of this VERY important story. This is a story that goes to the heart of disaster prevention.
Below is an excerpt drawn from a touching, longer and very well-written parable by Milo Thornberry Wednesday, June 18, 2008 http://milosjanusoutlook.blogspot.com/

"Ye Zhiping knew about the shoddy construction of at least one of the Sangzao Middle School buildings because he had been a young teacher there when the building was constructed.
"Quality inspectors were supposed to be here to oversee construction of this building," he said. "When the foundation was laid, they should have been here. When the concrete was put into the pillars, they should have been here. But they weren't. In the end, no government official dared to come inspect this building because it was built without any standards…"
"I was among the first teachers who moved into this building, and I was pretty young," Ye said. "Our awareness of safety wasn't the same as now."
Ye’s attitude changed after he became principal twelve years ago.
If I knew there was a hidden danger, and I didn't do anything about it, then I would be the one responsible," he said.
From the day he became principal he didn’t waste time. He set about to get the funds for a complete overhaul of the buildings. One can only imagine the response of the “wise old greybeards” in the bureaucracy when he sought the money for the reconstruction. The county was poor and Sangzao was only a farming village. But Ye continued to pester the officials until he got 400,000 yuan (about $60,000). From 1996 to 1999 he personally oversaw a complete overhaul of the structure.
Most crucial were changes made to concrete pillars and floor panels. Each classroom had four rectangular pillars that were thickened so they jutted from the walls. Up and down the pillars, workers drilled holes and inserted iron reinforcing rods because the original ones were not enough, Ye said. The concrete slab floors were secured so they would be able to withstand intense shaking.
There were probably other greybeards in the school who thought that the principal had more important things to do than spend his time supervising the renovation.
Ye not only brought structural integrity to the buildings; he also had students and teachers prepare for a disaster. They rehearsed an emergency evacuation plan twice a year.
On May 12, Principal Ye was in a town fifty kilometers away when the earthquake came. As he worked his way back to his school he saw the rubble to which buildings had been reduced on the way. On the day that 10,000 students were crushed by collapsing school buildings, 1,000 of them in a school less than 20 miles away, the students at Sangzao Middle School managed to evacuate in less than two minutes.
The students lined up row by row on the outdoor basketball courts…. When the head count was complete, their fate was clear: All 2,323 were alive.
Students and parents credited “Angel Ye.”
“We’re very thankful,” Qiu Yanfang, 62, the grandmother of a student, said as she sat outside the school knitting a brown sweater. “The principal helped ease the nation’s loss, both the psychological loss and the physical loss.”
These days, students are seen darting in and out of the school to retrieve books, ducking under blue tape clearly marked danger. The building looks secure enough, but not to Principal Ye. He said it has to be torn down and a new one built, not simply to withstand an 8.0 that came this time, but to withstand an 11 or 12. And he expects to be there to see that it is built right."

Earthquake Safe Havens a Non-Starter

There's a little discussion following Ana-Marie's posting below in which Garry brings up the notion of building "safe haven" spaces from earthquakes. I think that this is a non-starter. The ONLY possible safe haven for 1,000 children in a school building is the classrooms themselves.

Before the design, engineering and construction problems I can see several very serious problems with the notion of designing and building earthquake-safe havens:

1. There is no evidence that those subject to strong shaking can go anywhere at all. Most people report that they can't move anywhere safely. So there's no option but for the whole building to be strong enough not to collapse. (The only exception are those very far from the epicenter who may be able to get an early warning from primary waves).

2. For schools it doesn't work just because of the density of occupancy. You'd have to build another place as big as a school to accommodate 1,000 children in a safe haven - so the school itself has to be the safe haven.

3. Suppose that people survived in the thousands in life safe voids, by design or even by accident. Judging by the evidence from both Kashmir and Weichuan, we'd have to be honest and let people know that life-safe voids will not be uncovered within the golden 72 hours for survival... "Lucky" people probably did survive in these places - just to perish there later, unrescued...

4. Even if we could anticipate places where search and rescue will find survivors, we can't responsibly tell people to do something to get to those spots until we first ascertain that such advice would not do more harm than good. This applies equally to the ideas of "safe havens" and "life-safe voids":

Take these photos as an example.
Just because search and rescue workers can prove that they save more people near the outer walls of collapsed buildings does not mean that everyone should get near outer walls. Just because "outside" away from the building is safer than inside, does not mean that everyone should run outside. In both of these building, drop cover and hold would have been the safest thing to do. If people had congregated by the outer walls they would have fallen to their deaths. If they had run outside, they would have been smothered by falling debris.

So the question is not "What could have been done to save people in the buildings with the most fatalities?" The question has to be "What can be done to eliminate fatalities and reduce injuries?" The latter requires a much broader perspective and a research method that that looks at the currently safe sites as well as the most hazardous sites.

I don't think the "cost savings" idea for building earthquake-safe havens works either. I would bet that it would be very hard to find a poor surviving parent in China who believes that they could not afford to build their child's school a safe school.

Indeed we are all agreed that there is a LOT more to learn... about being able to anticipate collapse patterns, about how long it takes buildings to collapse, about the differential rates of deaths and injuries in heavily damaged vs. collapsed buildings, about what is the safest course of action for everyone who is going to feel the shaking and therefore follow whatever advice it is that we promote.

Let's see who wants to step up to fund this research, and pursue it systematically!

P.S. As for doorways - the biggest problem is that they are all so different, depending on construction and placement. Some offer some protection to one or two people (except for the injuries caused by the door itself swinging), others offer none at all. Doorways are a non-starter for schools no matter what the class size.

PARENTS ANGERED OVER DEATH OF SCHOOL CHILDREN IN CHINA

These are the eloquent voices of survivors of school collapse, more compelling than our reams of reports and rants...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2008/may/22/braniganschool?gusrc=rss&feed=worldnews

Please watch this video.
Please share this.
Please play this at gatherings of school officials and educators.
Please reach out to parents, teachers, and students in China to express your solidarity, and support the mobilization of these new and potentially powerful school safety advocates.

The smartest thing that the Chinese government could do now is to help turn the grief and anger of surviving parents into a school safety movement that will assure that it never happens again. Parent survivors could become partners to government - advocates, monitors and ombudsmen for disaster resilient construction, ensuring that from now onwards, every new school is a safe school, and every unsafe school is replaced.

SCHOOL DESKS DURING AN EARTHQUAKE

School collapse in Mexico City earthquake, 1985. Thanks to unknown photographer!

I am of course much angrier about tens of thousands of children dying in their schools in China and in Kashmir, and wherever will be next than I am about Doug Copp who is, after all, probably well-intentioned. But what we are after here is an evidence-basis for what to teach and share about surviving a strong earthquake. And the evidence suggests not that everyone will be saved by anticipating triangles of life, but that it's too late when it shakes!

Every week I find about 10 bloggers reproducing Copp's viral e-mail. While one photograph does not constitute scientific evidence of what is safe in most circumstances - it certainly gives lie to one of Copp's assertions - that children died at their desks in the Mexico City earthquake in 1985. The main reason they didn't is that the earthquake did not take place during the school day. However, as this photograph shows, had the children in this school practiced "drop, cover and hold" they would mostly have survived unscathed.

Children in Kashmir and children in China did indeed die at their desks - betrayed by the very systems that made them attend school to prepare for bright futures. Given their proximity to the epicenter (negligible time between feeling the less damaging primary waves and the very damaging secondary waves), strong shaking, and speed of collapse - a reasonable hypothesis is that they had no time to do anything that could have been protective. (Photos of those schools also disprove that running outside is an option... the debris falls a in a radius around the outside equal to about 1/3 x the height of the building.)

Moreover, since clearly the survivable voids were not uncovered during the golden 48 hours for search and rescue, those who might have been lucky enough to survive for a time in those places, would most likely have died there days later... not really a prospect to get all excited about. (The subject of urban search and rescue is one to return to another time).

In a scientific study we would want to see a random selection of perhaps 100 schools in the affected geographic area, and look at construction type and number of stories as major variables.

Here is another real problem - typical double school desks in many countries have a footrests underneath that makes them a particularly awkward place to drop cover and hold. In these cases, getting down and protecting head and neck under the desk would be better than having these parts of the body exposed. Some countries (eg. Turkey) are replacing flimsy desks with steel desks. This is a fine idea, but it is no substitute for replacing unsafe buildings, and retrofitting those that are not built to withstand the expected shaking.

And finally - if you happened to have ever forwarded Doug Copp's email - please take it back and try to undo the damage. It's a good habit to research potential urban legends on www.snopes.com. Here's a 4-part investigative report on Doug Copp that should give people some pause:
http://www.abqjournal.com/terror/196540nm07-11-04.htm
http://www.abqjournal.com/terror/196965nm07-12-04.htm
http://www.abqjournal.com/terror/197273fire07-13-04.htm
http://www.abqjournal.com/terror/197538nm07-14-04.htm

On to other important topics...

SCHOOL DISASTER REDUCTION & READINESS CHECKLIST

This 2-page checklist is intended as a simple universal template developed for use by school safety advocates worldwide.

Please let us know if this is useful. If you'd like to sponsor a translation or adaptation, please work with a multi-disciplinary group representing different sectors and types of to get a consensus on terminology and appropriate localization. We would appreciate it if you would share your experiences with us.

Thanks to contributors: Sanjaya Bhatia, Patrizia Bitter, Balaka Dey, Rebekah Green, Yasamin Izadkhah, Anup Karanth, Ilan Kelman, Bishnu Pandey, Marla Petal, Kevin Ronan, Zeynep Turkmen, Suha Ulgen.