2010 Haiti earthquake

• 1. Introduction

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  The 2010 Haiti earthquake struck at 16:53 local time on Tuesday, the 12th of January 2010. It lasted less than 30 seconds. It hit the most populated area of the country, and about three million people were affected. It is counted as the deadliest natural disaster of the 21st century for a single country. Yet no one can say how many people died. Counts run from tens of thousands to more than 300,000, and the dispute remains unsettled. Why did a magnitude 7.0 quake do such damage? Had anyone seen it coming? And when billions of dollars in aid were pledged, why were so many people still living in tents years later?

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• 2. Warnings Beneath Léogâne

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  For roughly 250 years, the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault in southern Haiti had been locked, quietly gathering stress. It forms one branch of a strike-slip system along the northern edge of the Caribbean plate. That plate shifts eastward relative to the North American plate by about 20 mm each year. A second branch, the Septentrional-Oriente fault, runs through the north of the country.

  Moreau de Saint-Méry, a French historian who lived from 1750 to 1819, recorded the island's earthquakes during the colonial era. After a quake in 1751, he wrote, only one masonry building in Port-au-Prince had not collapsed. Of the 1770 quake he wrote that the whole city collapsed. On the 7th of May 1842, another earthquake destroyed Cap-Haïtien and the Sans-Souci Palace. On the 4th of August 1946, a magnitude 8.0 quake in the Dominican Republic sent a tsunami that killed 1,790 people.

  A 2007 hazard study by C. DeMets and M. Wiggins-Grandison judged that the fault zone could be near the end of its seismic cycle. Their worst-case forecast was a 7.2 Mw quake, similar in size to the 1692 Jamaica earthquake. In March 2008, Paul Mann and colleagues presented a hazard assessment to the 18th Caribbean Geologic Conference. They noted the heavy strain, the fully locked fault, and how few earthquakes it had recorded in the preceding 40 years. Their team urged "high priority" studies of past ruptures. In September 2008, Haiti's Le Matin newspaper cited geologist Patrick Charles on a high risk of major seismic activity in Port-au-Prince.

  The rupture itself began about 13 km underground, roughly 25 km west-southwest of Port-au-Prince, with its epicenter near the town of Léogâne. It occurred on blind thrust faults tied to the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden system, and no surface rupture has been found. A study published in May 2010 suggested the picture was messier than a single break. It pointed to slip on several blind thrust faults, with only minor, deep sideways movement near the main fault. If so, the quake relieved only a small part of centuries of accumulated strain. The rupture ran roughly 65 km, with a mean slip of 1.8 m and peaks near 4 m.

  Shaking reached intensity IX on the Modified Mercalli scale in Port-au-Prince and its suburbs. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated that 3.5 million people lived where intensity ran from VII to X. That range can cause moderate to very heavy damage even to earthquake-resistant structures. The shallow depth made the damage worse than for other quakes of similar magnitude. Cuba, Jamaica, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic all felt it, though Kingston and Caracas recorded only MM II.

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• 3. Shocks and a Wave

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  Eight aftershocks arrived in the first two hours, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, with magnitudes between 4.3 and 5.9. Within nine hours the count reached 32 of magnitude 4.2 or greater, and 12 of those measured 5.0 or more. By the 24th of January, the agency had logged 52 aftershocks of 4.5 or greater.

  At 06:03 local time on the 20th of January, the strongest aftershock yet struck, at magnitude 5.9 Mw. The agency placed it about 56 km west-southwest of Port-au-Prince, almost exactly beneath the coastal town of Petit-Goâve. A United Nations representative reported seven collapsed buildings there. Red Cross staff had reached the town for the first time only the day before. They estimated that it had already lost 15% of its buildings. Save the Children workers in the capital heard "already weakened structures collapsing". Further casualties were thought to be minimal because people were sleeping in the open.

  The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued a tsunami warning immediately after the first quake and quickly cancelled it. Nearly two weeks later, reports emerged that the beach at the small fishing town of Petit Paradis had been hit by a localised wave. Researchers later confirmed it, and an underwater landslide was the probable cause. Witnesses said the sea first retreated, then a "very big wave" crashed ashore, sweeping boats and debris out. The wave reached heights up to 3 m, and at least three people swept out to sea were reported dead.

  One account of the region's history gave the aftershocks a darker meaning. Historical records are imprecise, but they suggest a sequence of quakes moving westward along the fault, beginning in the Dominican Republic in 1751. Some feared that January 2010 was the start of a new long-term sequence. In the words of one report, "the whole region is fearful".

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• 4. A Country Built to Fall

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  Haiti ranked 149th of 182 countries on the Human Development Index, and it is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The Food and Agriculture Organization called it "economically vulnerable". The Australian government's travel advisory site had earlier doubted that Haitian emergency services could cope with a major disaster. In the summer of 2008, Tropical Storm Fay and hurricanes Gustav, Hanna and Ike killed nearly 800 people. A history of national debt, prejudicial trade policies by other countries, and foreign intervention in national affairs helped create the poverty and poor housing that raised the toll.

  Haiti had no building codes. Engineers said that few buildings would have stood through any kind of disaster. Structures went up wherever they could fit, and some stood on slopes with insufficient foundations or steel supports. A Catholic Relief Services representative estimated that about two million Haitians lived as squatters on land they did not own. Shortages of fuel and drinking water already plagued the country before the quake.

  In February 2010, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive estimated that 250,000 residences and 30,000 commercial buildings were severely damaged and needed demolition. In Léogâne, the deputy mayor said 90% of the town's buildings were destroyed. The National Palace was severely damaged, though President René Préval and his wife Elisabeth Delatour Préval escaped without injury. The Palace of Justice, the National Assembly, the Supreme Court and Port-au-Prince Cathedral were also hit. The main prison was destroyed, and around 4,000 inmates escaped. The Washington Post described City Hall as "a skeletal hulk of concrete and stucco, sagging grotesquely to the left." The city had no municipal petrol reserves, and few officials had working mobile phones.

  Minister of Education Joel Jean-Pierre said the education system had "totally collapsed". About half the nation's schools and the three main universities in Port-au-Prince were affected. More than 1,300 schools and 50 health care facilities were destroyed. A nursing school fell, and the primary midwifery school was severely damaged. Haitian art suffered too, with museums and galleries damaged, among them the Centre d'Art school and Holy Trinity Cathedral. The Christopher Hotel, headquarters of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), was destroyed, as were World Bank offices. A Citibank building collapsed and killed five employees. The clothing industry, which supplies two-thirds of Haiti's exports, reported structural damage at its factories.

  Three Médecins Sans Frontières medical facilities around Port-au-Prince were affected, and one collapsed completely. A hospital in the wealthy suburb of Pétion-Ville also fell. So did the St. Michel District Hospital in Jacmel, the largest referral hospital in south-east Haiti. The airport's control tower at Toussaint L'Ouverture International Airport was seriously damaged. At the Port-au-Prince seaport, a container crane tilted badly because of weak foundations, and the harbor was unusable for immediate rescue work. The seaport at Gonaïves in the north kept operating. The main road to Jacmel stayed blocked ten days after the quake. Hazem el-Zein of the World Food Programme said, "I can only think that their priority must be somewhere else."

  Telecommunications fared little better. The public telephone system was unavailable, and the carriers Digicel and Comcel Haiti both reported disruption. Radio Lumière, which reaches 90% of Haiti, was knocked off the air and resumed across most of its network within a week. About 20 of the roughly 50 stations active in the capital region were back on air by then. Meanwhile the quake had also created a landslide dam on the Rivière de Grand Goâve. Engineer Yves Gattereau feared it could collapse in the rainy season and flood Grand-Goâve, 12 km downstream.

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• 5. The Uncounted Dead

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  In mid February 2010, the Haitian government reported that the death toll had reached 230,000. That same month, the Inter-American Development Bank gave a range of 200,000 to 250,000. It called the quake "the most destructive event a country has ever experienced when measured in terms of the number of people killed as a share of the country's population". An investigation by Radio Netherlands questioned the official figure and proposed 92,000 as more realistic. On the first anniversary, the 12th of January 2011, Prime Minister Bellerive raised the government's figure to more than 316,000.

  Anthony Penna, a professor emeritus of environmental history at Northeastern University, warned that any casualty estimate could only be a "guesstimate". The Belgian disaster response expert Claude de Ville de Goyet observed that "round numbers are a sure sign that nobody knows." Edmond Mulet, a United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, said he did not think anyone would ever know the toll. Jean-Pierre Guiteau, director of the Haitian Red Cross, explained that his organization had not had time to count bodies. Its focus was the treatment of survivors.

  On the 31st of May 2011, news emerged of an unreleased draft report from a door-to-door survey commissioned by the US Agency for International Development. A Washington consulting firm, LTL Strategies, produced it. It put the death toll between 46,000 and 85,000. It counted 895,000 displaced people, of whom only 375,000 remained in temporary shelters. A State Department spokesperson said the report had inconsistencies and would stay unreleased until they were resolved. As of January 2012 it was still unreleased. The agency's own website said 1.5 million people were displaced and 550,000 remained without permanent shelter.

  The most reliable academic estimate within six weeks of the quake appears to be 160,000, from a 2010 University of Michigan study. More than 95% of those deaths occurred in the immediate Port-au-Prince area. A 2013 preprint study placed the toll at around 137,000.

  Most of the dead were Haitian civilians, but the roll also included aid workers, embassy staff and foreign tourists. Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot of Port-au-Prince died, as did the aid worker Zilda Arns and opposition leader Michel "Micha" Gaillard. So did well-known musicians and sports figures, including thirty members of the Fédération Haïtienne de Football. At least 85 MINUSTAH personnel were killed, among them Mission Chief Hédi Annabi, his deputy Luiz Carlos da Costa, and police commissioner Douglas Coates. Around 200 guests died when the Hôtel Montana collapsed.

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• 6. Life Among the Ruins

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  Port-au-Prince's morgues were overwhelmed almost at once. By the 14th of January, a thousand bodies lay on streets and pavements. Government crews gathered thousands more by truck. Mati Goldstein, who led the Israeli ZAKA delegation, called it a "Shabbat from hell". He said the numbers of bodies were "beyond comprehension". Mayor Jean-Yves Jason said officials argued for hours over what to do. Some above-ground tombs were forced open so bodies could be stacked inside, and others were burned. Dump trucks carried tens of thousands of bodies to trenches dug by earth movers in a field outside Titanyen. The Vodou priest Max Beauvoir protested: "it is not in our culture to bury people in such a fashion, it is desecration".

  President Préval and his ministers set up in the police headquarters near the airport, with extremely limited effectiveness. Several parliamentarians were still trapped in the Presidential Palace, and offices and records had been destroyed. Some senior officials had lost relatives or were tending wounded ones. The president and cabinet met UN planners daily, yet as of the 16th of January no single group had organized relief.

  Eastern towns in the Dominican Republic prepared for tens of thousands of refugees. By the 16th of January, hospitals near the border were full, and by the 17th some had used up critical supplies such as antibiotics. Dominican soldiers reinforced the border, and the government said Haitians crossing for medical help could stay only temporarily. One local governor said, "We have a great desire and we will do everything humanly possible to help Haitian families. But we have our limitations with respect to food and medicine."

  Slow distribution of aid brought reports of looting and sporadic violence. Some accounts told of looters wounded or killed by vigilantes, and neighbourhoods built their own roadblocks. Dr Evan Lyon of Partners in Health, working at the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince, said misinformation and overblown reports of violence hampered aid. Lt. Gen. P.K. Keen of US Southern Command said there was less violent crime in the capital after the quake than before. Singing carried through many neighbourhoods at night. Groups of men organized as security while groups of women handled food and hygiene. Hundreds marched in peaceful processions, singing and clapping.

  Several orphanages were destroyed. After the adoption of 400 children by families in the US and the Netherlands was expedited, Unicef and SOS Children urged a halt. Jasmine Whitbread of Save the Children said most children on their own still had living relatives "who will be desperate to be reunited with them". On the 29th of January 2010, ten American Baptist missionaries from Idaho tried to cross into the Dominican Republic with 33 Haitian children. They lacked proper authorization and were arrested. On the 5th of February they were charged with criminal association and kidnapping. Their leader was Laura Silsby. Investigators found that more than 20 of the children had been taken from parents who were told the children would have a better life in America. By the 9th of March all but Silsby had been deported, and she remained incarcerated.

  Rescuers needed to speak with Haitians whose main or only language was Haitian Creole, so a mobile program to translate between English and Haitian Creole had to be written quickly. The relief effort also produced what was called a "second disaster" of waste. The US military reported distributing millions of water bottles and styrofoam food packages where no operational waste management system existed. Emergency shelter required over 700,000 plastic tarpaulins and 100,000 tents. Plastic waste and poor disposal blocked open drainage channels, which raised the risk of disease.

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• 7. The Crowded Airport

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  The Dominican Republic was the first country to send aid, with water, food and heavy-lifting machinery. It sent eight mobile medical units with 36 doctors, plus 39 trucks of canned food. Ten mobile kitchens and 110 cooks could produce 100,000 meals a day. Its emergency team assisted more than 2,000 injured people. ICE-SAR from Iceland was the first team to reach Port-au-Prince, landing within 24 hours of the quake. A 50-member Chinese team arrived early on Thursday. Qatar flew in a C-17 carrying 50 tonnes of supplies. An Israel Defense Forces team built a field hospital in eight hours and began operations on the evening of the 16th of January.

  Technology changed how the world gave and helped. The American Red Cross set a mobile donation record by letting people text US$10 gifts. By the 4th of March, it had raised US$50 million with Mobile Accord's platform, and James Eberhard of Mobile Accord said US$32.5 million came from text giving. The OpenStreetMap community greatly improved local maps using satellite photography from GeoEye. The crowdmapping website Ushahidi coordinated messages to help people still trapped. The International Charter on Space and Major Disasters was activated to share satellite imagery with rescuers. On the 22nd of January, the most-watched telethon in history, "Hope for Haiti Now", aired and raised US$58 million by the next day.

  Until the 13th of January, an Argentine military field hospital that had been serving MINUSTAH was the only one available. Médecins Sans Frontières reported that surviving hospitals were swamped by seriously injured people and performed many amputations. Short of supplies, some teams made splints from cardboard and reused latex gloves. More than 3,000 people had been treated by the group as of the 18th of January. Ophelia Dahl of Partners in Health said she had heard an estimate that "as many as 20,000 people will die each day that would have been saved by surgery."

  A single runway and ten large-aircraft spaces normally handled about 20 flights a day at Toussaint L'Ouverture International Airport. After the quake, hundreds of planes arrived without designated landing times, and a plane landed or took off on average every two minutes. The ramp sometimes held nearly 40 aircraft at once. Some planes lacked fuel to leave. The Haitian government had handed control of the airport to the United States. Médecins Sans Frontières said an aircraft carrying a field hospital was repeatedly turned away, along with four other aircraft. Its press release of the 19th of January said, "It is like working in a war situation. We don't have any more morphine to manage pain for our patients."

  Aid workers accused US-run operations of putting security troops ahead of rescuers and supplies. Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim and French Minister of State for Cooperation Alain Joyandet criticised perceived preference for US flights. The US military said that up to the 17th of January, 600 emergency flights had landed and 50 were diverted. The Associated Press later reviewed US Air Force logs and largely disproved the claim that aid was held up for military flights. Military units had priority at first to secure the airport, and later flights were cleared first-come, first-served. Rejected flights were diverted to the Dominican Republic and their cargo went in by land. On the 18th of January, the United Nations and US forces formally agreed to put humanitarian flights ahead of security reinforcement.

  By the 14th of January, more than 20 countries had sent military personnel, with Canada, the United States and the Dominican Republic supplying the largest contingents. A US supercarrier arrived at maximum speed on the 15th of January with 600,000 emergency food rations and 19 helicopters. A helicopter carrier and its escorts formed a "sea base" for the rescue effort. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had ruled out airdrops of food and water as too dangerous. Even so, by the 16th of January, US helicopters were dropping aid to places that could not be reached by land.

  On the 22nd of January, the United Nations and the United States signed an agreement giving the US responsibility for ports, airports and roads. The United Nations and Haitian authorities took charge of law and order. The UN said, "we're leaving that emergency phase behind". The next day the Haitian government officially called off the search for survivors. Rescue still had surprises left. On the 8th of February, a 28-year-old named Evan Muncie was found alive in the rubble of a grocery store.

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• 8. Money and Rubble

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  On the 16th of January, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Haiti and said US$48 million had already been raised in the United States. President Barack Obama named former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to coordinate recovery fundraising. Vice President Joe Biden said the effort would remain on the radar "long after it's off the crawler at CNN. This is going to be a long slog." The pledges that followed were large. The European Union promised €330 million. Brazil announced R$375 million. The United States committed US$100 million on the 14th of January. Italy waived repayment of a €40 million loan, and the World Bank waived the country's debt repayments for five years. Canadians privately raised C$220 million by the 12th of February deadline for government matching.

  The Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, with 26 members, convened in June 2010 and was headed by Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Bellerive. It oversaw US$5.3 billion pledged internationally for the first two years of rebuilding. Haitian groups criticised it for lacking Haitian civil society representation and accountability mechanisms. Half its seats went to foreigners who effectively bought them by pledging money. An international development consultant contracted by the commission said it "was simply designed as a vehicle for donors to funnel multinationals' and NGOs' project contracts."

  Six months after the quake, as much as 98% of the rubble remained. About 26 million cubic yards (20 million cubic meters) made most of the capital impassable. About 1.6 million people lived in camps of tents and tarps, and almost no transitional housing had been built. Twenty-three major charities had collected US$1.1 billion, but only two percent of it had been released. In July 2010, CNN reported, "It looks like the quake just happened yesterday". Imogen Wall of the UN humanitarian office in Haiti said it might still look the same six months later.

  In October 2010, a cholera epidemic broke out, probably introduced by United Nations peacekeepers. By the end of 2010, more than 3,333 people had died, at a rate of about 50 deaths a day. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called it the worst cholera epidemic since the 1994 outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. By August 2013 it had killed over 8,231 Haitians. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew caused an upsurge in the epidemic. As of March 2017, around 7% of the population, or about 800,665 people, had been affected, and 9,480 had died. The UN launched a US$2.2 billion initiative against cholera. It also built a US$17 million teaching hospital in Mirebalais that would employ 800 Haitians.

  Oxfam reported in January 2011 that only five percent of the rubble had been cleared and only 15 percent of required basic and temporary houses built. Michaëlle Jean, UNESCO Special Envoy for Haiti, wrote in a public letter: "As time passes, what began as a natural disaster is becoming a disgraceful reflection on the international community." In January 2012, United Nations figures showed that only 43% of nearly US$4.5 billion pledged for 2010 and 2011 had been delivered. Only 6% of bilateral reconstruction aid had gone through Haitian institutions. Tropical Storm Isaac, on the 25th of August 2012, caused flooding and 29 deaths. Hurricane Sandy that October killed 55 while over 370,000 people still lived in tent camps.

  In 2015, NPR and ProPublica investigated what happened to US$500 million donated to the American Red Cross for Haiti. The charity said it had built 130,000 homes, but the investigators found only six had been built. The Red Cross also claimed to have helped 4.5 million Haitians. Joel Boutroue, a Haitian government advisor, noted that this would cover every city in Haiti. The investigation found bureaucratic delays and staffing changes, and many officials spoke neither French nor Haitian Creole. By June, the American Red Cross had transferred the rebuilding to the Haitian Red Cross.

  In 2017, UN Humanitarian Coordinator Mourad Wahba reported that about 55,000 people were still in camps and makeshift camps. He added, "We have a very long way to go." Across the country, 2.5 million Haitians still needed humanitarian aid.

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