Prior to showing the animated Disney film Tangled, they showed some short videos created by the Stanford students, illustrating the danger of adobe construction collapsing during an earthquake.
#Environmental adobe drive movie#
On their first night in town, they put on a movie night, to introduce themselves and the project to the villagers. In classes, the students developed teaching tools for use by the volunteers who would go to Chocos in the summer.
#Environmental adobe drive how to#
The Stanford students focused on the outreach aspect – how best to teach the villagers the hazard they faced and how to implement the solution. The design of the retrofit was spearheaded by the partners in Peru. Geomesh is commonly used for stabilizing slopes and preventing soil erosion. The school retrofit involved wrapping the walls in sheets of geomesh, a molded plastic grid resembling construction or chain link fencing. The organizations selected the village of Chocos, about a 7-hour drive from the capital city of Lima over what Stanford graduate student Matt Bussman described as "some pretty death-defying roads."Ī principal Peruvian partner was the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, where researchers have been working on various techniques for strengthening adobe buildings. The Stanford group partnered with several organizations in Peru, as well as GeoHazards International, a Palo Alto-based nonprofit organization that works around the world to reduce the danger from geologic hazards. Some of the highest death tolls from earthquakes worldwide are due to adobe structures collapsing. "With adobe, it is a deadly combination of extremely poor material, in terms of stability, together with extremely large earthquakes, so the risk is huge."
"We tend to think of earthquakes killing people, but really what kills people are manmade structures that are shaken by earthquakes," said Eduardo Miranda, a Stanford associate professor of civil and environmental engineering involved in the project.
Over that same span, California – considered the most seismically active part of the lower United States – has experienced only one. But while adobe has the advantage of being easy to make from locally available materials, it is also extremely heavy, and walls built of adobe bricks are easily toppled during the severe shaking of a major earthquake.Ĭonsidered one of the most seismically active regions in the world, Peru has experienced eight earthquakes of magnitude 7.5 or greater since 1900. The Stanford group was a partner in a project aimed at teaching rural Peruvians about the dangers that earthquakes pose to adobe buildings and giving them the knowledge and skills to retrofit the buildings to make them less prone to collapse.Īdobe – a mixture of dirt, water and straw – is a common building material throughout the Andes. High on a mountainside in the Peruvian Andes – 9,000 feet above sea level – sits a modest adobe schoolhouse that is a lot safer for students and teachers than it was six months ago, thanks in part to the efforts of some Stanford students and their own teachers. (Photo: David Hermoza / Stanford University) Chocos resident Andres Matos De La Cruz uses what he learned in the training to explain how to strengthen the adobe school to withstand a strong earthquake.
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