Jackson, Ancient building codes still good for Panama

“And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock.

“And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand:

“And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.”

This passage from the Gospel According to St. Matthew must definitively put to rest the bleatings of unscrupulous builders and market fundamentalists who would argue that building codes are an undesirable bureaucratic innovation of modern times. Lawyers who are tempted to argue the point by distinguishing the carpenter’s parable quoted above from a duly enacted law would do well to refer to the Code of Hammurabi, promulgated centuries before Christ, a set of laws from a region prone to floods and earthquakes that addressed, inter alia, the question of building standards.

So what does this have to do with Panama?

This is the dry season, when we get little or no rain and the winds blow steady out of the north. Those winds, however, turn the Caribbean Sea choppy. So choppy of late that more than a dozen people who bought houses built on the sands of Colon province’s Caribbean coast have seen their beach front dreams washed away. They, and neighbors who fear that their houses might be next, are clamoring for relief from the government.

There may be cause for governmental action. Judicial authorities may want to examine the representations that were made and whether building codes were followed, and apportion the losses among the buyers and sellers of the destroyed homes accordingly. If permits were duly granted and the work was approved by inspectors, that should be cause for government administrators’ concern.

However, under no circumstances should the Panamanian people be expected to foot the bill for the loss of houses built upon sand, or to subsidize developers who erect such structures by building seawalls, breakwalls or other protective barriers at public expense. No way. Those whose greed for profits, or yearning for the idyllic life, lead them to play the classical fools’ role should bear the risks of their behavior.

We see variations on this theme time and again. In the rainy season of 2003, for example, thousands of people were flooded out of their homes in Arraijan. The Moscoso administration blamed it on residents clogging the drains with trash, which is certainly a cultural problem with many environmental and public policy consequences in this country. The Panamanian Society of Engineers and Architects, however, pointed out that the housing developments where residents were forced from their homes were built in low areas with inadequate drainage in the best of times. Whether or not these areas might have been deemed “flood plains” back in 1903, given the artificial barriers created by roadways built since then, they are now.

Panama’s vernacular architecture, and the building styles used in much of the old Canal Zone, have adaptations for construction where there is a danger of flooding. In Kuna Yala and Embera country, on the islands of Bocas del Toro and in the town of La Palma, we see houses built on stilts. But even in these places, the conventional wisdom has been that from time to time a really big flood will sweep such houses away.

It’s all well and good to say that Panama needs to address these questions. In fact we already do have laws that would go a long way in that direction. However, rich and powerful developers do what they want and the poor and impotent erect their shacks wherever they can, and when the predictable disaster ensues they look to the public treasury for relief.

Maybe stronger laws, and surely larger and more effective municipal building inspection departments, are justified. But the first essential step toward limiting this country’s vulnerability to natural disasters must be a hard-nosed refusal to pay for the loss of houses built upon the sand.

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Weisbrot, Promising the Moon, delivering unemployment
Jackson, Ancient wisdom still holds true
Gutman, A Guatemalan legal nightmare

opinion

And the rain descended...