Rubble, rubble, toil and trouble: the building of Rubble-House
Conscience International has spent the past year building new homes from the rubble created by the January 2010 earthquake that left so many Haitians homeless. SPSU is helping the organization by gathering scientific data to support the belief that, not only are these houses easy and inexpensive to build, they also hold up better than traditional concrete block homes in disasters such as earthquakes. This is the first time hard data has been collected on the sturdiness of these structures, but Conscience International has already built more than 30 of them in Haiti and has plans to build many more.
Beginning in late August, SPSU faculty members and students helped Conscience International build a house out of broken chunks of concrete – one of the few resources in abundant supply in Haiti since the quake flattened so many structures – using only hand tools on the green between the J Building and Howell Hall. The Rubble-House website contains updates and additional photos. A web cam was set up on the roof of the J Building to allow anyone interested to monitor a live shot of the work, which also attracted many bystanders.
Having completed much of the construction of a rough dwelling by mid-September, the team began performing a series of static
load tests on the walls on Sept. 19 to measure their ability to withstand pressure of varying degrees. They also hit freestanding
demo walls with a battering ram, and noted a vast difference between the damage it caused to a traditional concrete wall and
a wall made of rubble. Whereas the ram destroyed the concrete-block wall in short order, the rubble wall showed only localized
surface damage after extensive battering.
Final, destructive testing took place on Fri., Oct. 7. Next, Dr. Fatih Oncul in the School of Architecture, Civil Engineering Technology and Construction Management, and Dr. Wasim Barham and Dr. Metin Oguzmert of the Division of Engineering will use the data collected in the tests to build mathematical models showing how the structure responded to external forces. They will also subject a small section of the wall to a shaker table test in the near future.
The campus community is not alone in its interest in the Rubble-House project. Members of the news media have filed a number of stories on the progress being made, including the Marietta Daily Journal and WSB-TV. To view these reports, please visit: