By Rachel Shafer

On January 26, 2001, an 7.7-magnitude earthquake in the state of Gujarat, India, killed more than 20,000 people and destroyed almost a million homes. It was a terrible catastrophe but one that most people would forget by the next news cycle. Not Elizabeth Hausler.

More than 8,000 miles away in Berkeley, two years into her geotechnical engineering doctorate with a minor in structural engineering, Hausler (M.S.’98, Ph.D.’02 CEE) was contending with a crisis of her own. Once confident she would become Professor Hausler and work at a research university, she now doubted that goal, unsure it would fulfill her humanitarian calling.

When she heard the Gujarat news, Hausler had an epiphany. “I thought, ‘The earthquake didn’t kill people; buildings killed people.’ These were unreinforced masonry buildings that collapsed. That’s a problem made by man. So, we can find a solution, right?”

Hausler saw that she could use her technical expertise to help others construct safer buildings. Now 40, she runs the nonprofit she founded to do just that: Build Change designs and builds earthquake-resistant, locally appropriate housing in developing countries with active fault zones. Most important, it trains homeowners and builders so they will change construction practices and build safe structures long after Build Change has left.

To hear NPR’s May 5 story on Elizabeth Hausler and Build Change, go to http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103781626

It’s the large quakes that summon her. In the aftermath of Indonesia’s 9.1-magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami in December 2004, Hausler up and moved to one of the most devastated regions, Aceh. She knew no one. She didn’t speak Indonesian. Yet, within three years, Build Change helped hundreds erect earthquake-resistant homes.

Then, on May 12 last year, a 7.9-magnitude earthquake in Sichuan, China, left more than 88,000 people dead or missing and 5 million homeless. “Why does this keep happening?” Hausler thought, but she knew: lack of knowledge, lax enforcement of building codes and people with few resources.

By August, she moved to the quake-prone region in China, where foreign nonprofits are so rare that there is no formal process for registering them. The government didn’t exactly throw open its doors to outside help. Yet Sichuan’s need, the thousands living in tents and refugee camps, is acute.

It might be too much for a tiny nonprofit, struggling with funding, battling to establish an organizational foothold and held together by the sheer force of one person’s will. Pick a mountain easier to summit. But then you haven’t met Elizabeth Hausler.

Pick up the broken bricks
Construction wasn’t new to the Illinois native. Her father, a builder of custom masonry houses and low-rise commercial buildings, had Hausler and her older sister help out every summer. “I started at 13,” Hausler recalls. “My job was to pick up the broken bricks.” She became a forklift driver in high school and, by college, a skilled bricklayer.

At Berkeley, Hausler poured everything into her doctoral project, studying how to improve the ground under a building’s foundation to better perform in earthquakes. She received funding from the National Science Foundation and traveled to Japan to collaborate with prominent researchers in the field.

The Gujarat earthquake changed all that. Hausler completed her Ph.D. in 2002, but she didn’t pursue a faculty position. Nor did she apply for a lucrative consulting job. Instead, she spent eight months in 2003 as a Fulbright scholar in Gujarat, studying how people rebuilt their homes. She observed that it wasn’t enough to erect houses quickly; in that seismically active area, homes would have to withstand the big temblors that would surely come again. They would have to be inexpensive and constructed of local materials by local craftsmen with detailed input from homeowners. No aid organization was doing that. Right there, Hausler settled on her mission.

In fall 2004, she was formulating plans for the nonprofit social enterprise, to be called Build Change, with a small chunk of private funding and was getting ready to launch in India when the Indonesia quake struck. That scenario met the organization’s requirements: an immediate, widespread need for housing in a developing region prone to big quakes. Six months later she moved to Indonesia.

“The first night I was there [March 28, 2005], the Nias earthquake struck,” Hausler recalls. “It was a magnitude 8.6, and my hotel, which already had large cracks from the earlier quake, began swaying back and forth. I was on the fourth floor and it was making this whoosh, whoosh noise. This was by far the strongest earthquake I’d ever been in. It was scary. I had this flashback to a lecture by Professor Bray [Berkeley expert in earthquake engineering], who said, if you’re going to run out of a building in an earthquake, find your shoes. That’s all I could think about: Find my shoes! Find my shoes! That quake was indicative of what life would be like for the next three years.” During Hausler’s stay in Indonesia, the U.S. Geological Survey recorded 21 more earthquakes there measuring 6.0 or greater.

In the 90-degree heat with 90 percent humidity, Hausler got to work. Her starting point? Pick up the broken bricks. She studied why collapsed buildings failed, most often due to weak brick walls without steel reinforcement and with poor connections between columns and beams. She rented space in a sturdy building to serve as home and the Build Change office. She hired translators and an engineer, surveyed building supply shops and met with suppliers. She interviewed those who had lost their homes. Finally, she sought out the international relief organization Mercy Corps with this offer: Build Change would design and construct earthquake-resistant, culturally appropriate homes in partnership with individual homeowners; Mercy Corps would fund it. They struck a deal.

Fast, neat, strong
Hausler flew back to the Bay Area and requested design help from the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California (SEAONC). It was an interesting problem: The house would have to withstand big earthquakes but cost no more than $10,000 and use specific local materials. Indonesians, for example, avoid concrete block because there it’s poorly made. And, although a no-no in standard quake-resistant design, residents want tall walls and windows to ventilate away hot air.

Twelve SEAONC engineers volunteered. They produced a customizable design template and supporting documentation for a low-cost housing type shunned in developed countries but popular in developing ones: confined masonry. “It’s basically a house of cards with a rubber band around it,” Hausler explains. “But you make it earthquake resistant by building a high-quality masonry wall, laying steel reinforcement in between the bricks, confining the wall with reinforced concrete columns and beams and making sure each joint overlaps in its connection.”

In Aceh, the first houses rose from their foundations. Hausler worked alongside the crews and shared techniques for laying brick and other tasks. The workers had never met a woman who knew construction so well, much less one who could teach them. At first, it was awkward. To establish rapport, Hausler proposed competitions called Cepat Rapi Kuat (Fast Neat Strong) to see who could lay brick the best. “Sometimes I’d win, sometimes I wouldn’t,” she says. “It was fun.”

Hausler’s leadership style served her well. Mark Ferdig, Mercy Corps director of tsunami recovery in Indonesia, recalls his first visit to a Build Change house. “When we got there, Elizabeth introduced me to every member of the crew and meticulously walked me through each stage of the house. She got down on her hands and knees to show me the septic system. It was one of the most informative site visits I’d ever been to. She asked me to be on the same level, literally to get down on the floor with her, and we’ve had a solid working relationship ever since.”

In time, 33 Build Change earthquake-resistant homes were standing among the rice paddies and fish ponds of Aceh. But Hausler knew that the best hope for making a large impact was not building houses. It was teaching others to build them. Build Change developed technical guidelines to distribute to well-established nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) like Oxfam and Catholic Relief Services. It developed educational materials that explained in simple terms why it was important to reinforce and confine masonry. It taught construction seminars and trained students from local technical high schools. It consulted on house designs and checked the quality of their construction.

Visit www.buildchange.org.

 

By the time Hausler left Indonesia, Build Change had influenced the construction of 4,200 homes. Thanks to her, almost 400 workers could ask for higher wages with their new skills, skills that emphasized quality. Cepat Rapi Kuat. Fast Neat Strong. Hausler departed for China, but her 21 Indonesian staff members continue the Build Change mission with funding from the Alwaleed Bin Talal Foundation.

“What she did in Indonesia seemed almost impossible from the start,” says Hausler’s former Ph.D. advisor, Professor Nick Sitar of civil and environmental engineering. “If anyone can succeed in China, Elizabeth can.”

“They need a million houses”
It’s 8 a.m. on a typical day in the Sichuan refugee camp, where Hausler wakes to the sound of roosters crowing and motorcycles buzzing by. She lives in the Build Change field office with the other staff, women in one room and men in another; they have two additional rooms that serve as offices.

Since she moved to China, Hausler has been busy. She’s hired 16 employees, including structural engineers, a drafter/designer, cost estimators and construction trainers. Build Change must grow its operation quickly to meet the huge demand, yet fund-raising is one of Hausler’s biggest challenges, especially now that the world has hit a dramatic economic recession. One or two days a week, she leaves the camp for her official Chengdu office to apply for funding and market Build Change’s technical resources and expertise to other agencies.

As word spreads about its presence in China, Build Change is expanding its reach on several levels. Hausler has been invited by a growing number of local and county government officials to come to their villages to help. She is developing relationships with several Chinese and international NGOs. The Red Cross and Red Crescent are in the process of distributing 17,000 Build Change fliers. Her staff is advising cash-strapped homeowners on floor plans and how to apportion their meager savings to get their safe homes built. They regularly distribute a template villagers can use with their contractors to ensure good construction practices. Educational materials are in production, and training and site supervisions are under way. By the end of the year, Hausler hopes to influence the design and construction of tens of thousands of homes.

It’s not enough. “They need a million houses,” says Professor Stephen Mahin of civil and environmental engineering, a Build Change advisor and consultant with the Chinese government on Sichuan reconstruction. “If you build 100 earthquake-resistant houses a year, or even several hundred a year, it will take 1,000 years. But that’s no excuse not to do it.”

Hausler has a natural ability to win others to her cause. Like Tim Hart, a 19-year structural engineering veteran who used 100 precious vacation hours to help Build Change in Indonesia. And Rebecca Nixon (M.S.’04 CEE), who took a three-month sabbatical from her structural engineering firm to work for Build Change in China. And a coterie of admiring Berkeley engineering professors who meet regularly with Hausler to advise her on technical matters, share contacts and direct her to potential funders.

“We have a lot of graduates who become philanthropic later in their careers, but she was philanthropic right from the beginning,” Nick Sitar says. “She could have quickly gone on to a major career here in the states, but she chose to face this uncertainty.”

She’s humbled when refugees with next to nothing insist she stay for lunch in their temporary shelters. She’s encouraged by the large number of residents, particularly women, who want their new houses, which will be nestled at the foot of mountains formed by the seismically active Longmenshan Fault, to be well engineered. Above all, she can’t wait to travel to the construction sites and see the villagers bring their new homes to life, brick by brick.