EEFIT (Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team) has been sending teams of earthquake engineers to bring back the lessons from damaging earthquakes since 1983.  After many weeks of planning and preparation, a three person team has mobilised to study the Haiti earthquake of 12th January 2010, spending the six nights between 7th to 13th April in Port-au-Prince.

All earthquakes have their unique features (that’s why EEFIT has investigated so many) but the Haiti earthquake poses unique challenges not faced before by the EEFIT organisation.  The team, all with many years of experience in various earthquake related fields, attended a one day security briefing course run specially for us by RedR, something no previous EEFIT mission has done, so we are aware of the issues and possible difficulties that face us.  Nevertheless, we realize that if we are to achieve our aspiration of contributing to the international effort of studying the earthquake and aiding recovery in Haiti, we need to expect the unexpected. We hope to update this blog on a daily basis from Port-au-Prince.  Full scientific and engineering reports of our findings will be posted on the EEFIT website in due course.

The team consists of:

Edmund Booth, a self-employed consulting structural engineer, with many years of experience in the earthquake resistant design, analysis and assessment of buildings and other structures.  Edmund was a founder member of EEFIT, and has visited the scene of six major earthquakes, but he expects this to be his most challenging mission.

Gopal Madabhushi, a reader in geotechnical engineering in the engineering department at Cambridge.  He is the assistant director of the Schofield Centre which houses the earthquake simulation facilities on the geotechnical centrifuge.  He has a particular interest in seismically induced liquefaction and soil structure interaction.  He has participated in many EEFIT missions, and led the one to Taiwan in 1999 and to Bhuj, India in 2001.

Keiko Saito, a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing specialist. Her area of interest is in the application of GIS and remote sensing to quantify and visualise the risk from natural disasters on the built environment, and she has spent the last ten years working in this field.  She is the deputy director of CURBE (Cambridge University centre for Risk in the Built Environment), part of the Department of Architecture at Cambridge, and a director of Cambridge Architectural Research Ltd.  She has been leading CAR's involvement in a World Bank image assessment project.

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