Written by Fran Mdlay
Dominic Dowling was a student engineer when he developed earthquake-proof housing
Dominic Dowling was a student engineer working as a volunteer in Central America in 2001 when a huge earthquake hit the tiny republic of El Salvador, triggering landslides that killed hundreds of people and destroyed thousands of homes.
It wasn´t his first experience of earthquake. As a child, Dominic recalls his hometown of Newcastle rocked by earthquakes in 1989, but the destruction he witnessed in El Salvador was on a scale he had not imagined.
The damage to the local traditional adobe homes, made of mud-brick, astounded him; in some areas, complete villages had been destroyed.
The experience was life-changing; and as Dominic did what he could to help rebuild some of the devastated homes, he realised that there was a desperate need for a simple – and, most importantly, cheap – engineering solution that could reduce the risk to people living in adobe (mud-brick) homes.
Dutch building expert Wolf Schijns estimates more than a third of the world´s population lives in adobe houses. Mud bricks have been used to build houses for at least 10,000 years.
Millions of adobe homes worldwide are in areas vulnerable to earthquake, and thousands of people die unnecessarily each year when these homes collapse. "Mud brick is a very brittle, low-strength material," Dominic explains.
Returning to his studies at the University of Technology in Sydney, Dominic began to research a simple reinforcement technique from cheap materials like bamboo or cane that could easily strengthen a home by forming a matrix to distribute force more evenly around the structure.
Dominic continued his research through a PhD in engineering; and the technique that he has now developed, Quake Safe, allows the mud walls to be reinforced with bamboo poles (or local materials such as cane) that are bound together with string and then covered with a network of thin wire.
The Quake Safe system can be used in new mud brick building as well as retrofitting existing structures.
Using the university´s million-dollar "shake table," he was able to refine and test his system on the three-metre square platform that could reproduce the effects of a significant earthquake – and he proved that his solution was workable.
Even in a strong earthquake, the system holds the structure together long enough for people to escape the building, drastically reducing the risk to occupants; and in many cases, the house will even be habitable after a moderate earthquake. His invention attracted attention when he presented it on the ABC-TV program The New Inventors in 2006.
Dominic completed his PhD the same year and shortly afterwards travelled to California, where he worked on a project developing reinforcement recommendations for buildings in Iran.
At the end of 2006, he re-visited a village in El Salvador and applied the years of theory by retrofitting the home of a family he had worked with years before with a full-scale implementation of Quake Safe. It took just two weeks and around fifty dollars to complete the project.
A project in Pakistan followed during 2007, advising on earthquake reconstruction for UN Habitat.
This year, Dominic has been sponsored by an Australian finance company, Wizard Home Loans, to work in a remote Indian village in the Himalayan foothills, strengthening some key community buildings and transferring some useful skills to local tradesmen.
Apart from a few small consulting jobs, this is one of the first paid roles he has had, thanks to the Wizard sponsorship. Much of Dominic´s work has been self-funded; and the Quake Safe system that he spent so many years developing is his gift to the millions of people in vulnerable homes that he hopes to protect from the ravages of natural disasters.
His dream is to see the Quake Safe system adopted by local builders worldwide.
"Every single structure we work on is different, so there´s no fixed solution. I´ve focused on training the local masons so that they can come to a building and diagnose the structure and spot the problems, see what things can be done to make a house safer," he explains.
"Installing the structural reinforcement system can be done in about a week with some trained people; and then it takes another week or so to plaster over the top to give an attractive finish," he says.
The great advantage of Quake Safe is the low cost – and the ability to use local people and local materials.
Dominic returns to Australia late this year for his own wedding and he plans to continue working as a consultant, spreading the word about this simple system that could have such major implications for the developing world.
"There´s only so much I can do, but by getting local people trained up, the concept grows organically and I don´t need to be there to supervise. In ten years´ time when someone builds a house I hope the natural thing will be to reinforce it this way."
