Promised Story

I had written the other day that I would share an interesting history lesson about the buildings of Haiti.

In the late 1700s, Port-au-Prince had a population of about 2,000 people. They suffered a powerful earthquake which destroyed all of their cement buildings. This earthquake killed 200 people. (The same percentage that was estimated killed in the January 12, 2010 earthquake.) As a response to this earthquake, they built a bunch of "gingerbread houses" which are made of wood. They had heard that wood is more pliable and holds up against earthquakes.

In the 1800s there was another large earthquake in the southern city of Les Cayes. Again, the cement houses collapsed and the wooden houses withstood the quake, enforcing the need for wooden structures.

Port-au-Prince was built up with almost completely wooden houses. Then in the early 1900s, a fire swept across the city destroying all the wooden buildings and the surviving buildings were the cement structures. Thus, they rebuilt the city in cement.

What will be the new material......?