With the growing danger of natural disasters, the race is on to expand access to programs that safeguard lives from the human-made danger of poorly built housing. With the common mission of building safer, stronger structures, Build Change and Simpson Strong-Tie have partnered for the Simpson Strong-Tie® Fellowship for Engineering Excellence program. This year’s fellow is Build Change Engineering & Design Services Director Tim Hart, SE. As with our previous fellows, Hart is documenting his journey with the program on the Simpson Strong-Tie Structural Engineering blog.
When I agreed to travel for Build Change to the Philippines and Indonesia in March, some of my friends and colleagues told me I was brave. Others told me I was crazy. One asked me whether I was afraid that I would not be able to get home. At the time, I felt it was safe to go since there were only a few cases reported in the Philippines, Indonesia and the United States. Even so, I waited until the last minute before I told my mother of the trip, knowing that she would be worried and would try to talk me out of going.
Things changed, of course, while I was in Manila. The President of the Philippines announced while I was there that Metro Manila was going into lockdown in order to contain the virus outbreak in the city. At the same time, an increasing number of COVID-19 cases were being reported not just in Manila, but also in Indonesia and the United States. As we all learned later, this was only the beginning of a rapid chain of events that have affected all of us, and at the time required me to leave the Philippines earlier than I had planned and return to the United States instead of traveling to Indonesia.
While my time in the Philippines was cut short, I was able to get a few productive days in, working with the Build Change Philippines team on developing tools for microfinance institutions (MFIs) to evaluate applications for home improvement loans. These loans are intended to facilitate the ability of homeowners to make structural improvements to their houses so the houses can better resist forces from earthquakes and typhoons. One of the challenges faced by our team has been to make the evaluation tools simple enough that a loan officer or homeowner could easily understand how to use them. Perhaps a more significant challenge has been to design the structural interventions such that the construction cost wouldn’t exceed the loan amounts and at the same time persuade homeowners to use the loans for structural upgrades in addition to any other home improvements they wanted. Most homeowners would think of using their loan to pay for a new kitchen or a remodeled bathroom, or to repair water leaks in the roof before they would think of retrofitting their house structure. It’s important, though, that families have a house that not only provides a clean, practical place to live every day, but also that provides safe shelter during and after a natural disaster.
