Bamboo can play a role in disasters and relief in the following ways:

1. Bamboo’s ability to withstand vibrations help in mitigating disasters. Buildings made of bamboo survive earthquakes while concrete structures collapse. Latin American houses built with bamboo have survived earthquakes.

 2. Bamboo’s soil binding properties helps in preventing land degradation, soil erosion and land slides. It preserves watersheds. Underground roots can spread over a 100 square metre area. When rains fail bamboo rhizomes increase soil moisture. This can help in drought proofing.

 3. Bamboo plantation reduce the impact of winds and hence cyclone intensity.

In many parts of the world, through old practices and recent innovations, bamboo has been used for the purpose of construction, especially as a medium to cope with disasters like landslides and earthquakes. In Limon, Costa Rica, only the bamboo houses from the National Bamboo Project withstood the 1992 earthquake that reached 7.6 on the Richter scale. Properly constructed bamboo framed homes have demonstrated excellent wind strength. Flexible and lightweight bamboo enables structures to survive in earthquakes of Costa Rica as well as Columbia.

In the Latin American and Caribbean countries, due to increasing causalities due to earthquakes, in the continent, bamboo as a construction material is being promoted.

The aftermath of destruction in Costa Rica helped to focus worldwide attention on the potential of bamboo housing in disaster relief. A similar disaster struck the Cafetero Axis region of Colombia in January 1999. The Colombian Bamboo Society was quick to react to the urgent need for housing by earthquake victims. Society co-founders, architect Simon Velez and botanist Ximena Londono, worked together to design and build bamboo prototype housing for the victims. Their efforts also publicized the post-earthquake engineering studies that showed that housing which used traditional bamboo lattice work suffered far less damage than those employing “modern” concrete methods.

It started from an earthquake in Columbia where a watchtower of a local Coffee Park, in Pijao designed by Simon Velez and built by his partner Marcelo Villegas survived. Eighteen meters tall, and seven meter free overhang, it remained unmoved by the earthquake. The municipality of Pijao, with 8,000 inhabitants, located next to the epicenter only counted three casualties. Nearly all-traditional houses, which still stood, as if nothing had happened, were made from bamboo.

 Concrete bridges are dangerous and expensive in regions prone to landslides. Bamboo again comes to the rescue here. Some of the earliest of all suspension bridges were ones constructed with cables woven from bamboo strips. Throughout their long history, the Chinese have built suspension bridges to span fast-flowing rivers and deep ravines, and the Incas also designed hanging bamboo bridges.

Bamboo architecture in South America is born as an intelligent constructive reaction after seismic events. This is the case of the Peruvian “Quincha” , constructive system that is used since the XVII century in Lima, and in the rest of Peru and Ecuador and the Colombian “Bahareque”, very used from the XIX th centuryin the coffee growing area, west of Bogotá, in the highest seismical area of this country,. Both building systems resisted very well all the earthquakes that happened along their history. Costa Rica, without any bamboo tradition, created the Bamboo Foundation ca. 1980, and made a lot of quarters with bamboo houses that withstand very well the tremors caused by earthquakes. In Tucumán, Argentina, bamboo is used as a building material in rural areas.

 Bamboo offers the best properties for the seismic-resistant constructions. Because of its light weight, high resistance and great flexibility, Bamboo turns out to be particularly adequate to withstand earthquakes. In fact, even though they are covered with “ferrocemento” (iron-cement), Bamboo houses weigh almost 40% less than the traditional ones, being thus the seismic load reduced in the same proportion. Bamboo high resistance is comparable to that of the best wood. With its more efficient natural design, its flexibility provides it with a great capacity for seismic energy dissipation.

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