Haiti: Disasters and extreme poverty

Onhell

Onhell

Infinite Dreamer
I'm sure you have all heard about the 7.0 earhtquake that devastated the island nation of Haiti earlier this week. The international response has been amazing, from the U.S to Iceland to the equally poor neighboring country of the Dominican Republic has sent aid. I was very pleasantly surprise by all the help and the speedy response the country received, but it also got me thinking.

It seems to me disasters are a lot like Christmas and Mother's Day. We shouldn't be nice just in December to get presents and make nice with family and we shouldn't pay attention to our mothers just on mother's day, it should be a constant thing.

In a similar light, I feel that poor nations are continously ignored until they are hit by a huge disaster. Like The 2004 Hurricane of South East Asia, or even though it was in the U.S it was a poor sector, the breaking of levies in New Orleans...

Former president Clinton recently stated this is something he has been working on for decades, meaning aid to poorer nations. Former President Carter has done so as well. but it seems to me that unless something like a hurricane or Earthquake distroys a section of our world, the majority of agencies and nations don't really give a hoot.

For example, Africa is still in shambles, though local war lords do have a lot to do with aid not being able to reach the neediest of folks.

I guess it is normal human nature to not respond to things until it is too late, but I just feel that a country like Haiti that has been dirt poor since their independance should have received this sort of aid ages ago and petty politics and possible racism got in the way.
 
I'm very proud to announce that my country sent a pile of jack shit, and that biggest papers reported "Major earthquake strikes Haiti, 5 Croatians in danger".

:nuts2:
 
We had some of the same in the tabloids in Norway, except it was "1 Norwegian citizen missing". However, several organizations here have sent personnel and material as well.

However - and this addresses Onhell's post - Jan Egeland, who has held several positions in the UN and is now director at Norwegian Institute of Foreign Politics (a research institute) states that the rich countries should take much more responsibility for helping the poor countries prevent the vast damage that often happens when disaster strikes. He claims that this way, many more lives will be saved - with the same amount of resources (work and money) spent.

He has a point. Many deaths after earthquakes, landslides and tsunamis are due to infrastructure which isn't robust enough, and insufficient warning systems. If some of the money we spend on emergency aid instead had been used pre-emptively, many lives could have been saved ...
 
The simple fact of the matter is that if a 7.0 hits San Francisco or Tokyo, the death toll would be much smaller because the infrastructure is designed to survive such things. A 7.0 in Tokyo, the most populous city in the world, could result in a death toll of under a thousand, conceivably, due to the fact that pretty much every building in Tokyo was destroyed twice in the last 100 years.

A 7.0 isn't *that* powerful of an earthquake, either. The 1923 quake that annihilated Tokyo with comparable casualties in a bigger city centre than Port-au-Prince was an 8.3. I can't do logarithmic maths in my head but it's literally at least 20 times more powerful. That should tell you how utterly shitty everything in Haiti was.
 
Indeed. Even the ones striking Mexico City in '57 and '85 were in the 8s. Modern buildings in Mexico (1940s on) are all built with earthquakes in mind. In fact, after the '85 earthquake a special recue unit called "Los Topos" (The Moles) was born and still very active in rescue efforts. I'm actually curious to see if some were sent to Haiti.
 
You're quite right on your logarithms, LC. Take that from a man with an engineering degree  :D The 10-logarithm of 2 is about 0.3, so an increment of 1.3 on the Richter scale means 20 times more energy is being released in the quake.

When an earthquake at 7.0 causes a death toll going into 6 digits, this is a proof of terrible infrastructure and that the place wasn't very well prepared.

The earthquake in Kobe in 1995, for example (source) had a comparable intensity, but only 6,434 died ...
 
LooseCannon said:
That should tell you how utterly shitty everything in Haiti was.
Click to expand...

Yep. Depending on what source you want to read, Haiti is the poorest place on the northern or western hemisphere of our planet. (ah well, both is also possible, isn't it? ;) ).

It's shitty indeed.

Dictatorship, Aids, tropical storms, floods, this... how much can a country take?
 
Poor Haiti earthquake victims.  :(
I hope their country will recover someday.
To Onhell, there's a correction: Back in 2004, Southeast Asia was hit by tsunami, not hurricane.
 
That's right, my bad, it was the tsunami caused by the earthquake at mid ocean... Thank you for the correction.
SinisterMinisterX said:
Sweet fancy Moses, Onhell is back. :o

Is this going to become like the legendary poochburner sightings? :bigsmile:
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Perhaps haha, my new job is VERY demanding and life consuming, not to mention I'm still involved in two part-time jobs and volunteering at the church on Sundays, so I don't see myself coming here as often as I'd like. Hell, I still have posts to make on the symphonic/classical metal thread hahaha
 
Zare said:
I'm very proud to announce that my country sent a pile of jack shit, and that biggest papers reported "Major earthquake strikes Haiti, 5 Croatians in danger".

:nuts2:
Click to expand...

Same. 100 bloody Germans in danger.



Haiti was the first country in Latin America to shake off colonial chains for God's sake. France fucking owes them.
 
Haiti has been exploited by not just one country over the years, and I would love to see billions of aid pouring in. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if Haiti would know what to do with it. Fact of the matter is we would go in, build them a modern city, and watch as their six educated people left try and figure out how to run it.

It's not that bad, but close.
 
That's the point with every poor country. You need to start with education.
 
Once you have education settled, you need to have a proper government, of course. ;)
 
Haha, I missed this place. I still believe "proper goverment" is extremely subjective though... Again, Cuba and China are great examples. Even amongst "Western" powers there is a huge disparity amongst their democratic republics. I know we have discussed governments on other threads like the one on the war, thus my intention is not to reopen said subject, merely to point out the obvious that "proper government" is rather muddy to define and execute.
 
Onhell said:
thus my intention is not to reopen said subject,
Click to expand...

Why not? One of the most important tasks of a government is disaster relief and disaster prevention. Granted, No government in the world can prevent earthquakes, but a good government has to have disaster plans and the necessary means to organise and execute them, so it won't get worse than it already is. You never know when it hits you, and thus you have to be prepared at any given moment.

In fact, some governments have been overthrown by the people after mismanaging natural disasters.
 
True... The previous discussions were mainly on international policy and differing ideologies. I guess one can discuss what government model is best suited for disaster relief. We have seen pretty much all existing models fail miserably at some point. I am not even sure what new changes FEMA and the U.S goverment underwent to prevent another New Orleans.

Most response to disaster is tailor made according to nation. Australia has an amazing response since there are very poisonous ants and scorpions which can kill an individual in 20 min or less. Southern California fire fighters know that it will be an annual battle and are ready, etc. I am ignorant of Haiti's history of earthquakes, but given that a 7.0 one devastated the entire nation, specially Port-au-Prince goes to show it doesn't happen too often.

This just shows I live under a rock and do not keep up on my politics and world news as much as I should.
 
Wiki: On January 12, 2010, at 21:53 UTC, (4:53 pm local time) Haiti was struck by a magnitude-7.0 earthquake, the country's most severe earthquake in over 200 years. The epicenter of the quake was just off the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince. The focus was about 6 miles (10 km) underground, according to the USGS. It has been estimated that the death toll could reach 200,000.

Haiti is a terribly poor country, and before this earthquake it hardly had any infrastructure.
Because of this poverty, it is logical that the money didn't go to the buildings/infrastructure etc.

Haiti's earthquake history (wiki):
An earthquake struck in 1751 when the island was under French control, and another struck in 1770. According to French historian Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750–1819), "only one masonry building had not collapsed" in Port-au-Prince following the 18 October 1751 earthquake, but "the whole city collapsed" during the earthquake of 3 June 1770. Another earthquake destroyed the city of Cap-Haïtien and other towns in the northern part of Haiti and the Dominican Republic on 7 May 1842. In 1946, a magnitude-8.0 earthquake struck the Dominican Republic and also shook Haiti, producing a tsunami that killed 1,790 people and injured many others.

Other causes for the bad infrastructure: Multiple hurricanes, causing flooding and widespread damage, most recently in 2008 from Tropical Storm Fay and Hurricane Gustav.
 
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