For Prof. Kenneth Hover, civil and environmental engineering, the difference between a national hazard and a national disaster can be reduced to a single word: concrete.

On Friday evening, Professor Hover — a man ConcreteConstruction.net calls one of “the top 10 most influential people in the Concrete Industry”— presented a photographic tour of his recent Cornell-sponsored visit to the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. During the presentation, Professor Hover described what he saw as a national failure of the Haitian government to protect its citizens by enforcing proper building codes, in a city that relies almost exclusively on one type of building material.

“There is only concrete in this region and masonry at the level of a home and cottage industry,” Hover explained. “Gentlemen set up on the sidewalk and sell bags of cement, others sell sand, others sell concrete blocks. Building these structures proceeds at a do-it-yourself, home-project pace … I saw buildings I could take down with a hammer from Lowes.”

In Port-au-Prince, the professor visited Cornell Weill Medical School’s GHESKIO clinic, which conducts advanced AIDS and tuberculosis research, provides regional medical care, and has most recently become a sanctuary for Port-au-Prince’s displaced and injured. According to Hover, the clinic’s soccer field has been converted into a refugee camp and the building itself, which was built on liquefiable soil in the former Port-au-Prince bay, has rotated almost a foot. He warned that even buildings without obvious major damage will not hold up in future earthquakes.

“In general, the buildings built to modern standards were able to survive and withstand the impact of the earthquake,” Hover said. “But later on, those buildings will have to be destroyed.”

Hover also emphasized his desire to provide students with a realistic picture of the earthquake’s aftermath.

“I didn’t want to load this [presentation] with disaster image after image,” he said, “because that’s not what you see. What I want to show you is what it’s like to ride in a Land Rover, down the valley, across the fault line, and into the city.”

Hover’s narrative began in an undamaged, sun-drenched village outside of Port-au-Prince, and presented a mundane picture of an international traffic jam snaking through the jungle. However, it did not take long to arrive at the slides marked “Devastation,” which depicted the wreckage as Hover’s convoy entered Port-au-Prince.

“The road gets more crowded, and you begin to see refugee camp after refugee camp,” said Hover.

In one photo, a completely intact gas-station structure cast a shadow over its neighboring convenience store.

“I’m guessing the pumps were a pre-packaged purchase and the building itself was built to local standards,” explained Hover.

But amidst the rubble of their destroyed capital city, Hover observed a graceful trend in Haiti’s beleaguered refugees.

Where “water is more precious than gold,” Hover described refugees with “so much dignity that they are using some of the little water they have to wash their clothes … there’s something like 300,000 people homeless, I saw one porta-john in the entire city.”

Many students attended the lecture in order to learn how Haitians were coping with the earthquake's aftermath.

“How does life go on?” wondered Molly Johnson ’11, who spent last semester studying waste management in Bangladesh as part of a co-op in engineering.

Hover said it was hard to tell whether future construction would improve the problems of the past.

“The technology exists to level the ground, but the cost is prohibitive,” he said. “If they’re going to rebuild on the same spot they need to go with a deeper foundation.”

Johnson pointed out that outside influences will play a key role in providing for Haiti's future.

“You need people that can think on their feet because the government officials don’t do anything,” Johnson said.

This message seemed to resonate for students attending the lecture.

“There are a lot of universities and federal agencies, a lot of attention on [Haiti] right now,” said Garret Halbach grad, who studies urban planning. “You have a lot of resource capital coming in. I think things can definitely change.”

Hover finished the lecture on a hopeful note.

“I do not want to imply a happy ending,” he said, “but the Haitian people are resilient. The structures collapsed but the people did not.”