The Commodity Store Inc. exploits Haitian disaster to market cement
- No link between Pozzolanic cement and collapsed buildings in Haiti
-TGI Pozzolan Cement conforms to international cement standards

April 23, 2010

Georgetown, GUYANA:

TCL Guyana Inc (TGI) condemns the efforts by The Commodities Store, an outlet of Fidelity Investments Inc, to link Pozzolan Cement to the cause of collapse of building in Haiti after the recent earthquake.

In an advertisement headed “ATTENTION CONTRACTORS” appearing in the Kaieteur News this week, The Commodities Store Inc.  indicates the cement products they have for sale that have “Just Arrived.” At the bottom of the advertisement is a note “*N.B. Not all cement on the market are classified as Portland. Do you know that many of the collapsed structures in Haiti were made with Pozzolan Cement?”

It is unfortunate that in an attempt to impose their own product on the market that The Commodities Store Inc. would exploit the unfortunate plight of the Haitian people. Guyana has been exemplary in its support for Haiti and the Haitian people continue to need our support and not to have their misfortune exploited for sales and profit.

The idea here is that Guyanese contractors should avoid Pozzolan cement because buildings constructed using that cement collapsed when a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti recently. This assertion is both patently untrue and disingenuous of The Commodities Store Inc. to peddle it as a basis for rejecting a competing product that they know meets and surpasses all international standards.

The issue with the collapse of structures in Haiti has to do with poor building practices: no codes, or little adherence to codes. Hence, no structures could survive the magnitude of that quake. This assertion is supported by the recognized scientists and engineers in the field.

Michael Havbro Faber, a professor of risk and safety at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) said that “These buildings are in no way designed for earthquake loadings and other severe natural events. For the world’s poor, safety is a question of resources. It’s reflecting not only a standard in designing and constructing buildings – it’s reflecting poverty. These people invest as much into their buildings as they can afford. The lack of money translates into new buildings that can basically carry only the weight of their materials plus people. Across the board – from structural systems, to materials, connectivity and joints – things are inadequate.

Brady Cox, is an engineering professor at the University of Arkansas. As a member of the National Science Foundation–funded GEER (Geoengineering Extreme Events Reconnaissance) he has deployed to Japan, Peru, Turkey, and elsewhere to study structural failures in the immediate aftermath of severe quakes. Cox said “The concrete used in most of the buildings, for example, was dangerously light on cement. (Concrete is essentially small rocks and gravel stuck together with cement. The cement is the expensive component, but it's also the most essential part as far as durability is concerned.) On top of that, pictures indicate that most of the buildings in Port-au-Prince lacked proper reinforcements. In many of the smaller buildings, you just have cinder blocks piled on top of one another with no supports of any kind, Concrete by itself can handle compression stresses, but reinforcements made of steel, rebar, or even rope are needed to resist tension stresses.”

And Pierre Fouche, an earthquake engineer from Haiti who is now getting his doctorate in earthquake engineering at the University of Buffalo, says "Many people are doing whatever they want; they can build whatever they want.  One of the biggest problems too is that in the country we do not even have a national building code, which is very sad. People with money can build reinforced concrete buildings with steel rods to strengthen walls and floors. But even these may not meet engineering standards to support a load vertically, and they definitely cannot handle the side-to-side forces of an earthquake. The earthquake, it's much more of a type of lateral loading, [and] for lateral loading you need special construction, but in many cases they are not designed, not even for current daily loading. But many people in Haiti live and work in unreinforced buildings — brick, block or concrete. He says some of these buildings use stacked bricks instead of solid vertical columns to support ceilings.

A large part of these deficiencies is no doubt the result of dire poverty, but experts say another problem is the rampant corruption in Haiti's construction industry. "They simply don't enforce any building codes," says Pedro de Alba, a civil engineer and earthquake engineering expert at the University of New Hampshire.

For the record, The TCL Group and TGI in Guyana, as the manufacturers and distributors of Pozzolan Cement we are constrained to respond head on to the dishonesty of the attack on Pozzolan cement. TGI’s Portland Pozzolan Cement conforms to the official ASTM Standard C-595 for Portland Pozzolan cement, promulgated by ASTM International (formerly American Society for Testing and Materials).

In the ad from The Commodities Store Inc, it states that the product available from that establishment is “in compliance with ASTM -1157. The ASTM C1157 is a standard that allows for slag, Pozzolan, limestone, fly ash and any combinations of these to be used.

TGI Guyana reiterates its commitment to supplying the local market with cement manufactured under internationally acceptable standards that provides superior quality and durability.