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Feb 18, 2010 · Late in the Haitian afternoon on January 12, 2010 an earthquake measuring magnitude 7.0 on the Richter Scale occurred. The earthquake’s epicenter was 16 miles west of Port-au-Prince, the largest city and capital of Haiti.
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The 2010 Haiti earthquake was a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 M w earthquake that struck Haiti at 16:53 local time (21:53 UTC) on Tuesday, 12 January 2010. The epicenter was near the town of Léogâne, Ouest department, approximately 25 kilometres (16 mi) west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital.
- $7.8 billion – 8.5 billion
- 7.0Mw
- 2010-01-12 21:53:10
- Overview
- The earthquake
- A country in ruins
- A people in crisis
2010 Haiti earthquake, large-scale earthquake that occurred January 12, 2010, on the West Indian island of Hispaniola, comprising the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Most severely affected was Haiti, occupying the western third of the island. An exact death toll proved elusive in the ensuing chaos. The Haitian government’s official c...
The earthquake hit at 4:53 pm some 15 miles (25 km) southwest of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. The initial shock registered a magnitude of 7.0 and was soon followed by two aftershocks of magnitudes 5.9 and 5.5. More aftershocks occurred in the following days, including another one of magnitude 5.9 that struck on January 20 at Petit Goâve, a town some 35 miles (55 km) west of Port-au-Prince. Haiti had not been hit by an earthquake of such enormity since the 18th century, the closest in force being a 1984 shock of magnitude 6.9. A magnitude-8.0 earthquake had struck the Dominican Republic in 1946.
Geologists initially blamed the earthquake on the movement of the Caribbean tectonic plate eastward along the Enriquillo–Plantain Garden (EPG) strike-slip fault system. However, when no surface deformation was observed, the rupturing of the main strand of the fault system was ruled out as a cause. The EPG fault system makes up a transform boundary that separates the Gonâve microplate—the fragment of the North American Plate upon which Haiti is situated—from the Caribbean Plate.
The earthquake was generated by contractional deformation along the Léogâne fault, a small hidden thrust fault discovered underneath the city of Léogâne. The Léogâne fault, which cannot be observed at the surface, descends northward at an oblique angle away from the EPG fault system, and many geologists contend that the earthquake resulted from the slippage of rock upward across its plane of fracture.
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Occurring at a depth of 8.1 miles (13 km), the temblor was fairly shallow, which increased the degree of shaking at the Earth’s surface. The shocks were felt throughout Haiti and the Dominican Republic as well as in parts of nearby Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. The densely populated region around Port-au-Prince, located on the Gulf of Gonâve, was among those most heavily affected. Farther south the city of Jacmel also sustained significant damage, and to the west the city of Léogâne, even closer to the epicentre than Port-au-Prince, was essentially leveled.
The collapsed buildings defining the landscape of the disaster area came as a consequence of Haiti’s lack of building codes. Without adequate reinforcement, the buildings disintegrated under the force of the quake, killing or trapping their occupants. In Port-au-Prince the cathedral and the National Palace were both heavily damaged, as were the United Nations headquarters, national penitentiary, and parliament building. The city, already beset by a strained and inadequate infrastructure and still recovering from the two tropical storms and two hurricanes of August–September 2008, was ill-equipped to deal with such a disaster. Other affected areas of the country—faced with comparable weaknesses—were similarly unprepared.
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In the aftermath of the quake, efforts by citizens and international aid organizations to provide medical assistance, food, and water to survivors were hampered by the failure of the electric power system (which already was unreliable), loss of communication lines, and roads blocked with debris. A week after the event, little aid had reached beyond Port-au-Prince; after another week, supplies were being distributed only sporadically to other urban areas. Operations to rescue those trapped under the wreckage—which had freed over 100 people—had mostly ceased two weeks into the crisis, as hope that anyone could have survived for that length of time without food or water began to fade. However, there were still occasional recoveries of people who had managed to survive such confinement for weeks by rationing the meagre supplies available to them.
It was estimated that some three million people were affected by the quake—nearly one-third of the country’s total population. Of these, over one million were left homeless in the immediate aftermath. In the devastated urban areas, the displaced were forced to squat in ersatz cities composed of found materials and donated tents. Looting—restrained in the early days following the quake—became more prevalent in the absence of sufficient supplies and was exacerbated in the capital by the escape of several thousand prisoners from the damaged penitentiary. In the second week of the aftermath, many urbanites began streaming into outlying areas, either of their own volition or as a result of governmental relocation programs engineered to alleviate crowded and unsanitary conditions.
Because many hospitals had been rendered unusable, survivors were forced to wait days for treatment and, with morgues quickly reaching capacity, corpses were stacked in the streets. The onset of decay forced the interment of many bodies in mass graves, and recovery of those buried under the rubble was impeded by a shortage of heavy-lifting equipment, making death tolls difficult to determine. Figures released by Haitian government officials at the end of March placed the death toll at 222,570 people, though there was significant disagreement over the exact figure, and some estimated that nearly a hundred thousand more had perished. In January 2011, Haitian officials announced the revised figure of 316,000 deaths. The draft of a report commissioned by the U.S. government and made public in May 2011 drastically revised the estimate downward to no more than 85,000. Officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) later acknowledged inconsistencies in data acquisition. Given the difficulty of observing documentation procedures in the rush to dispose of the dead, it was considered unlikely that a definitive total would ever be established.
Further deaths occurred as serious injuries went untreated in the absence of medical staff and supplies. The orphans created by these mass mortalities—as well as those whose parents had died prior to the quake—were left vulnerable to abuse and human trafficking. Though adoptions of Haitian children by foreign nationals—particularly in the United States—were expedited, the process was slowed by the efforts of Haitian and foreign authorities to ensure that the children did not have living relatives, as orphanages had often temporarily accommodated the children of the destitute.
Because the infrastructure of the country’s computer network was largely unaffected, electronic media emerged as a useful mode for connecting those separated by the quake and for coordinating relief efforts. Survivors who were able to access the Internet—and friends and relatives abroad—took to social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook in search of information on those missing in the wake of the catastrophe. Feeds from these sites also assisted aid organizations in constructing maps of the areas affected and in determining where to channel resources. The many Haitians lacking Internet access were able to contribute updates via text messaging on mobile phones.
The general disorder created by the earthquake—combined with the destruction of the country’s electoral headquarters and the death of UN officials working in concert with the Haitian electoral council—prompted Haitian Pres. René Préval to defer legislative elections that had been scheduled for the end of February. Préval’s term in office was set to end the following year.
As the spring rainy season and summer hurricane season approached with reconstruction efforts having made little progress, residents of tent settlements were encouraged by aid agencies to construct more-substantial dwellings using tarpaulins and, later, donated lumber and sheet metal. Though some provisional housing was erected before the onset of inclement weather, many persons remained in tents and other shelters that provided scant protection from the elements. Compounding the problems in the increasingly disorganized encampments within Port-au-Prince was the return of many people who, months before, had initially retreated to the countryside only to find little opportunity for employment.
- Richard Pallardy
Jan 12, 2020 · The magnitude 7.0 earthquake that hit Haiti in Jan. 12, 2010, left 220,000 people dead, 300,000 injured and rubble nearly everywhere.
Late in the Haitian afternoon on January 12, 2010 an earthquake measuring magnitude 7.0 on the Richter Scale occurred. The earthquake’s epicenter was 16 miles west of Port-au-Prince, the largest city and capital of Haiti.
