Yazman
18th January 2010, 12:41
Source: http://www.salon.com/technology/how_the_world_works/2010/01/13/haiti_catastrophe_waiting_to_happen/index.html
Snippet from source:
Within hours of the earthquake that devastated Haiti, the tweets were flying: Just a year earlier, Patrick Charles, a geologist at the University of Havana, had predicted that a major earthquake was imminent along the Enriquillo Fault Zone that runs under the nation's capital, Port-au-Prince.
"Conditions are ripe for major seismic activity in Port-au-Prince," he told the French-language Haitian newspaper, Le Matin in October 2008. "The inhabitants of the Haitian capital need to prepare themselves for an event which will inevitably occur... Thank God that science has provided instruments that help predict these types of events and show how we have arrived at these conclusions."
Barely a month later, after the catastrophic collapse of a school in Petionville, the mayor of Port-au-Prince warned that 60 percent of Haiti's buildings "were shoddily built and unsafe normally." A 2005 report from the Organization of American States' Department of Sustainable Development noted that "There is no national building code in Haiti." The loss of thousands of lives in flooding in 2004 was attributed in part to "the absence of land use zoning and building guidelines, and comprehensive enforcement mechanisms."
There is no mystery to this enormous disaster. As the Haitian Ambassador to the United States, Raymon Alcide Joseph, told CNN on Tuesday, "we had been expecting this catastrophe."
Haiti had been warned of the possibility of a major earthquake, and Haiti knew that its infrastructure was highly vulnerable. The real mystery, then, is whether anything could have been done to prevent, or at least ameliorate, the current nightmare. Or at least, that's the mostly unspoken subtext to all the chatter commenting on Patrick Charles' prescient prediction. How could we have let this happen?
Click the link for the full article.
So what does everybody think about this? It was clearly and widely known that there would be a massive earthquake in Haiti and there was zero preparation. Nobody helped them to prepare for or evacuate in case of such an event. We know that such preparation and evacuation is entirely possible - Cuba routinely does such things, and the government of the Philippines does pre-volcanic eruption.
Why was nothing done?
Snippet from source:
Within hours of the earthquake that devastated Haiti, the tweets were flying: Just a year earlier, Patrick Charles, a geologist at the University of Havana, had predicted that a major earthquake was imminent along the Enriquillo Fault Zone that runs under the nation's capital, Port-au-Prince.
"Conditions are ripe for major seismic activity in Port-au-Prince," he told the French-language Haitian newspaper, Le Matin in October 2008. "The inhabitants of the Haitian capital need to prepare themselves for an event which will inevitably occur... Thank God that science has provided instruments that help predict these types of events and show how we have arrived at these conclusions."
Barely a month later, after the catastrophic collapse of a school in Petionville, the mayor of Port-au-Prince warned that 60 percent of Haiti's buildings "were shoddily built and unsafe normally." A 2005 report from the Organization of American States' Department of Sustainable Development noted that "There is no national building code in Haiti." The loss of thousands of lives in flooding in 2004 was attributed in part to "the absence of land use zoning and building guidelines, and comprehensive enforcement mechanisms."
There is no mystery to this enormous disaster. As the Haitian Ambassador to the United States, Raymon Alcide Joseph, told CNN on Tuesday, "we had been expecting this catastrophe."
Haiti had been warned of the possibility of a major earthquake, and Haiti knew that its infrastructure was highly vulnerable. The real mystery, then, is whether anything could have been done to prevent, or at least ameliorate, the current nightmare. Or at least, that's the mostly unspoken subtext to all the chatter commenting on Patrick Charles' prescient prediction. How could we have let this happen?
Click the link for the full article.
So what does everybody think about this? It was clearly and widely known that there would be a massive earthquake in Haiti and there was zero preparation. Nobody helped them to prepare for or evacuate in case of such an event. We know that such preparation and evacuation is entirely possible - Cuba routinely does such things, and the government of the Philippines does pre-volcanic eruption.
Why was nothing done?