Psuedo-seismologists

The second week of Seb's stay with us was action-packed and a welcome break from stove surveys. On the monday Seb and Steph visited a comunity with REDES' barra de castilla houses to carry out a few interviews with the owners and do a technical assesment of the buildings, then on Tuesday and Friday we were in Suchitoto making our adobe stove, returning for a meeting with Edwin, the structural engineer who's carried out an assessment of the design's earthquake resistance. It was certainly the most relaxed technical meeting I've ever had (accompanied by a bottle of rum!) but it was very useful for Seb to get the details of Edwin's analysis and three hours later we stopped talking engineering and moved onto politics and music - unfortunately Douglas' wife didn't believe him when he got home and claimed he'd been working with us in the office until 1am, even though it was mostly true!

On Wednesday morning we had something entirely different planned - a conference on seismology. We were expecting it to be held in a faculty building, swarming with students, so were somewhat surprised when Douglas drove us to a residential area - the home of the Permanent Committee for Risk Management (Mesa Permanente para la Gestion de Riesgos.) It turned out that there were only about 5 other delegates, none of whom were engineers so whenever one of the professors giving presentations wanted an engineer's viewpoint we would be put on the spot - Seb and Douglas, despite being the only ones with degrees in civil engineering somehow got away scot-free! The presentations were excellent though and very interesting, the first was a detailed introduction to the seismic history of El Salvador, starting off with the earthquake in 1915 and working up to the the most recent ones in 1986 and 2001, including explanations of their causes and why El Salvador is so prone to earthquakes. This was followed by a study on using anomalous CO2 and SOx emissions to predict volcanic erruptions - the current verdict is that should be possible, but at the moment they can only identify what consists of an anomaly after the erruption has occurred! Finally there was a double session on a Central American initiative to model the most likely earthquake scenarios for all of the countries involved and then predict the resulting economic and social damage to help encourage governments to develop emergency relief plans and to improve the quality of housing, the majority of which is still adobe.

On Thursday we were back in the field, visiting San Jose de Costa Rica (Cuscatlan, El Salvador), not to be confused with the capital of Costa Rica which is also called San Jose! Its a truly beautiful village perched on a ridge overlooking the volcanic crater lake Ilopango, where Seb was lucky enough to have worked in 2005 building the barra de castilla houses and therefore was particularly keen to return and interview his old friends. The highlight of the day for me was undoubtedly the adventure Seb and I embarked upon to find one of the beneficiaries who lived on a pineapple farm. He thought he could remember where we had to go, but after half an hour of scrambling up and down hills, between prickly pineapples and then getting lost in a coffee plantation we were about ready to give up...we then hailed a guy cutting firewood further up the hill who told us that our man no longer lived there and the house was in ruins - we carried on looking for it but eventually gave up. Frustratingly the next house we went to told us that he knew exactly where the house was and that it was certainly still occupied, but by then it was getting dark and time to head home.