‘By protecting students, we are protecting our future’

On 1 February 2023, an earthquake measuring just 5.0 on the Richter scale damaged six schools in the Province of Peravia in the Dominican Republic, according to the Civil Defence^[1]. Five months earlier, the National Office for Seismic Evaluations and Vulnerable Infrastructure and Buildings (ONESVIE) had warned^[2] that about 1,200 of the country’s schools were built on earthquake fault lines.

Latin America and the Caribbean is the second-most disaster-prone region in the world, after Asia and the Pacific. That is why UNESCO focused on this region for its project Building Capacity to Reduce Disaster Risk in the Built Environment (BERLAC), launched in 2020.

One of the pilot countries is the Dominican Republic, where the project has striven to make schools safer in a disaster. BERLAC has not only focused on mitigating earthquake risk, but also flood damage caused by the hurricanes and tropical storms which regularly batter the region. 

During an earthquake, collapsing structures are responsible for 80% of casualties. Over the past three years, UNESCO has trained local students of engineering and architecture in the Dominican Republic how to assess the vulnerability of schools to an earthquake and correct this vulnerability through retrofitting and other measures. 

The first step was to identify and rectify vulnerabilities in existing school structures, such as a fissure along a bearing wall or a lack of early warning system.  For these inspections, UNESCO used the methodology of Visual Inspection for defining Safety Upgrading Strategies (VISUS), which had been developed by the UNESCO Chair on Intersectoral Safety for Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience at the University of Udine in Italy, Professor Stefano Grimaz. The VISUS methodology has been used previously in Indonesia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe amongst other countries.  

The inspectors used VISUS to identify risks and retrofitting opportunities in 85 schools across five municipalities in the Dominican Republic. They then conveyed these findings to the local and national governments, so that they could allocate targeted resources to fortify only those constructions in need of retrofitting. 

Under the guidance of UNESCO consultant and VISUS-trained civil engineer Ashley Morales, the VISUS team invited students, teachers, school principals and local leaders to accompany them on their school inspections. Rixanny De la Cruz, an architecture student from the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, was one of those who took part in this exercise. She described the experience as “gratifying”. This pedagogical approach had the advantage of raising community awareness about the importance of reinforcing weakened structures.  

However, damage to schools is not the only factor that keeps children away from learning after a disaster. Both earthquakes and floods can damage access roads, making it difficult for children to pursue their education, even if their school has escaped unscathed.  

In order to assess risks to both physical school infrastructure and the interconnected road network, the UNESCO Chair in Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience Engineering at the University College London in the UK, led by Professor Dina D’Ayala, developed an innovative platform for assessing this infrastructure using artificial intelligence (AI), to accelerate data analysis, and evaluate the risk of disruption to education caused by natural hazards. 

Given the absence of certain bridge infrastructure details in public records, drones were deployed to collect the missing information and complete the dataset. UNESCO has used drones similarly in The Gambia to collect data in order to establish an early warning system. 

In a simulated earthquake scenario in provincial Dominican Republic, the experts found that an earthquake would make schools unsafe for 201 days, more than six months.  

In an alternative scenario in which the Dominican Republic implemented comprehensive retrofitting of schools, roads and bridges based on the platform’s recommendations, the recovery time shrank to 79 days, or about two and a half months, thanks to the retrofitted infrastructure, which would cost just US$ 8 dollars per pupil. 

Flooding is another critical hazard in the Dominican Republic. It was, therefore, logical for the platform to also assess the exposure of schools to potential flooding scenarios. The platform projected a recovery time of approximately 74 days for rural areas hit by a flood with a water depth of 0.25 metres. In order to fortify buildings in flood-prone areas, the UNESCO experts proposed a standardized waterproofing system, which is projected to reduce the length of this disruption by more than half (35 days). In the event of a flood, this approach should benefit the province of San Pedro de Macoris’s roughly 80,000 pupils. 

The impact of the BERLAC project extends beyond technical assessments; it has also become a catalyst for community engagement and empowerment. Teachers have emphasized the positive changes brought about by the project, which has not only highlighted the importance of school maintenance but also its affordability. For Professor Luis Caraballo from the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, the beauty of the project also lies in having motivated the participating undergraduate students in architecture to consider incorporating elements in their future projects to make buildings safer in a disaster. 

Despite facing challenges such as limited funding and varying levels of engagement, the project has also provided much-needed relief to school staff, who have long held concerns about the resilience of the schools that they and their pupils use daily.  

As the BERLAC project ended in the Dominican Republic, a country where disasters are not a matter of 'if' but 'when,' the government is contemplating using VISUS to assess more schools and using the AI powered platform to prioritize retrofitting investment in the country. 

Sources:

[1]: Temblor afectó hospital y 29 centros educativos, Listin Diario, 3 February 2023 (accessed on 15 January 2024)
[2]: 1,200 escuelas son vulnerables a temblores, Listin Diario, 13 December 2022 (accessed on 15 January 2024)