Reply #1: This is terrible, we need research and codes to fight this problem [View All]

[social_critic]

There's a serious need to enforce building codes in Latin America, to make sure landslides and earthquakes don't lead to this type of high mortality incidents. But enforcing building codes doesn't work very well when people are so poor they have to put up substandard housing just to have some kind of roof over their heads. We also need some serious research on building techniques which can be used on sloping terrain. If I were doing this research, I would start it by interviewing hundreds of poor people who have built their homes, to see where they got the materials, where they got the ideas they used to build their homes, and where they got the money to buy the materials and pay for help to build them.

I have done some interviewing of this type, and at least where I did, I found the typical "favela" housing is actually built following a set of standard rules which have evolved over the years. Builders don't have any idea about design loads, earthquakes, or soil resistance, but they do know about structural soundness and practical solutions. The problem is this construction lore or tradition doesn't seem to address earthquakes at all, and it deals with landslides in a very cursory fashion. Even worse, these areas where poor people build dont have enforcement of regulations to make sure sewer discharge isn't into the soil - there are many documented cases where the water discharged from high density dwellings weakened the soil, and heavy rains were then able to soak the soil to such an extent whole areas came sliding down.

We can do better, and interim solutions are possible, if we get smarter at it. And please don't tell us the solution is government build housing. Governments don't act fast enough to keep up with population growth and movements. This has to be a grassroots effort, where the role of government is more to educate people, and possibly micro-finance them, to help them build better housing.