Why So Many People Were Killed in the Haiti Earthquake of 2010?

Why were so many people killed in the Haiti Earthquake of 2010?

Haiti is a small country positioned between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean with Port au Prince as its capital. It is located in the West of the Dominican Republic and shares the island of Hispaniola. On the 12 January 2010, an earthquake struck. Haiti lies on a conservative plate boundary, with the Caribbean plate and Atlantic plate moving in the same direction, but one moving faster. The friction between the two plates was eventually released causing a magnitude 7 earthquake on the Richter scale with an epicentre 16 miles West of Port-au-Price and a shallow focus of 5 miles with aftershocks of magnitude 5 or above. The earth quake cause caused massive damage to infrastructure and affected areas such as Port-au-Prince, Petit-Goâve, Léogâne, Jacmel and other settlements in south-western Haiti.  The death toll by the Haiti government is estimated to be around 31,000 people (it may not be completely accurate as many people did not have personal records and bodies were removed as soon as possible) and around 1.5 million people were left homeless.  However there have been earthquakes with the same magnitude on the Richter scale that have not caused as much damage as this one, for example the San Andreas earthquake of 1989. This led on to many arguments as to why, exactly, the death toll of the Haiti Earthquake of 2010 was so large. [pic 1]

Haiti’s poverty is one of the main reasons for such a large death toll. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. It has a GDP per capita of $819.9 with 66% of the population earning less than £1 a day and 56% of the population classed as ‘extremely poor’. Many people of Port au Prince are uneducated and work in informal jobs around the city. As well as this, the income per capita for people living in rural areas is about one third of the income of people living in urban areas and only 10% of people have electricity and less than 8 per cent have access to drinking water. This largely affected the death toll because, as many of them were uneducated, they were not prepared for a large earthquake and most did not know how to protect themselves. The destruction would have been considerably less in MEDC’s such as England as education is compulsory and everyone would know the safety precautions and how to keep the damage minimal.

Housing also played a very large part in the amount of damage done. Most houses in the urban area were self-built; made out of breeze blocks and scrap, with no foundations or rules restricting height. Having many buildings built like this along with the fact that it was mainly built on sedimentary rock contributed to the huge death toll in 2010. Buildings collapsed from no cross braces, even a few of these would have lowered the death toll immensely. As well as this 300,000 people lived in the Cite Soleil slum where there was no water or electricity supply. This meant that their houses were unstable and collapsed easily as soon as the earthquake started to shake. [pic 2]

Because of Haiti’s lack of finances it only has one airport with one runway. The control tower was badly damaged in the earthquake. The port was also unusable due to damage. This meant that there was a severe shortage of doctors and it was hard for rescue aid to arrive in Haiti quickly and badly injured patients or people trapped under buildings, although alive, often died of not being treated fast enough. Local people had to use their bare hands to try and dig people out of the rubble. All communication systems such as by air, land and sea transport facilities were damaged by the earthquake, which hampered rescue and aid efforts; confusion over who was in charge, air traffic congestion, and problems with prioritization of flights further complicated early relief work.

The earthquake of 2010 was not the only devastation Haiti faced. The hurricane season of 2008 was the cruellest natural disaster ever experienced in Haiti. Four storms – Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike – dumped heavy rains on the impoverish nation. The rugged hillsides, stripped bare of 98% of their forest cover thanks to deforestation, let flood waters rampage into large areas of the country. According to reliefweb.org, Haiti suffered 793 killed, with 310 missing and another 593 injured. The hurricanes destroyed 22,702 homes and damaged another 84,625. The flood wiped out 70% of Haiti’s crops, resulting in dozens of deaths of children due to malnutrition in the months following the storms. Damage was estimated at over $1 billion, the costliest natural disaster in Haitian history. The damage amounted over 5% of the country’s $17 billion GDP, a staggering blow for a nation so poor. Since this hurricane, another 4 struck Haiti, forcing hundreds of thousands more people to flood into Port au Prince. This made a massive impact onto the death toll of the 2010 earthquake as many new buildings were built hastily without much thought or safety precautions to house more people and there were twice the amount of people in Haiti than before meaning more people had a higher chance of dying therefore raising the death toll.