Haiti is the most unequal of all countries in Latin America, which is one of the most unequal regions in the world.12 Even Chile, the least unequal of the Latin American countries, is still well down the list on global standards. Pétionville is a tiny oasis of wealth and Cité Soleil a broad desert of poverty in Haiti. There are many ways to express social inequality, but one way to get a sense of its magnitude is this fact: The 85 wealthiest people in the world today have a combined wealth equal to that of the bottom half of the world’s entire population.13 That comparison might be even more stark in Haiti, where the poor are so very poor and so numerous, and the elite so wealthy and so few by comparison. Individuals in the Haitian elite may have wealth equal to the sum of the income of as many as 2 million of the poorest Haitians. The World Bank has estimated that the richest 20 percent holds more than 65 percent of the country’s total income, while the poorest 20 percent holds barely 1 percent.14
The earthquake started blanket bombing the city of Port-au-Prince at 4:53 p.m. on January 12, 2010. The most intense barrage was short, shaking the ground for only 10 or 11 seconds. The onslaught came from the west, from a region near the town of Léogâne, which was flattened on the way. Destruction was indiscriminate; the homes of the rich and the homes of the poor were all targets. Even the presidential palace scored a direct hit.
The first shock was followed by more than 60 aftershocks in the next days and weeks. The capital city had no defenses. These aftershocks knocked down just about anything still standing, much of which was weakened by the first attack. When the aftershocks ceased, more than 200,000 homes had been destroyed or severely damaged; most of them belonged to the poor.15 Damage maps and photos of the Port-au-Prince area taken from high altitude look like damage maps from the firebombings of German cities toward the end of World War II. Vast tracts of buildings were brought to rubble heaps in both places. The damage seems almost capricious—some buildings stand essentially undamaged among the ruins of others. Some areas look to be 100 percent flattened; others appear unscathed.
Just how deadly the sacking of Port-au-Prince was will never be known. In massive events such as the Haitian quake, most morgues fail to function. In New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina struck, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency established a DMORT (Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team) facility, a temporary morgue with volunteer morticians, in the town of St. Gabriel, a considerable distance from New Orleans, to compensate for the submerged and mostly inoperative morgues in the city itself. Nothing of that sort happened in Haiti. Bodies, mostly unidentified, were brought to vast open burial sites by the truckload.
In the early aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, the Red Cross16 estimated that around 50,000 people had died, in accord with the initial estimate from the Haitian government (which may have merely been a repetition of the Red Cross figure). Several revisions followed, until the official death toll was put at 220,570—though figures as high as 300,000 had been mentioned.17 If the official toll is correct, it equals or exceeds the death toll from the 2004 Great Sumatran earthquake and tsunami, which affected a vast area around the Indian Ocean. Such a high mortality figure is not entirely unreasonable. Port-au-Prince was a densely crowded city. Almost no buildings were constructed to be earthquake resistant.
The Haitian government eventually raised its total count to 300,000. Most major relief agencies—Oxfam, Catholic Relief Services, Doctors Without Borders, and others—adopted a figure closer to an earlier government estimate of 230,000 or else finessed the issue by stating that “several hundred thousand” had died. On the first anniversary of the quake, the government put the death toll at 316,000. A very high death toll was inevitable, but that number is probably an overstatement.
Two sources of information have suggested that the Haitian death toll may be exaggerated. Netherlands Radio Worldwide claimed that “only” 52,000 people had been buried at official burial sites, the only places where any attempt was made to keep a count of the dead.18 The article also asserted that the government reported 20,000 to 30,000 deaths in the coastal town of Léogâne, close to the quake epicenter, whereas Léogâne authorities themselves said they had buried 3,364. The article further reported that the government claimed 4,000 dead in the town of Jacmel, whereas a French aid group whose workers were involved in burying the Jacmel dead reported only 145 bodies. Jacmel authorities, the report went on to say, settled on a death toll of between 300 and 400.
The uncertainties and inconsistencies were further underscored in a “post-disaster needs assessment” created by the Haitian government in the weeks after the earthquake.19 In that report, injuries were put at 300,000 and deaths at 220,000. A 3:2 ratio of injuries to deaths is actually quite low; typically, it is closer to 3:1 and often much higher.20 If the injury figure is correct (and injury counts are somewhat easier to determine accurately, since they can be based on actual cases recorded by relief agencies), the more customary injury-to-death ratio implies a death toll closer to 100,000.
The second source is LTL Strategies, a consulting firm specializing in international and business development. In a report to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) on building assessment and rubble removal (BARR), LTL took a quite different approach to estimating mortality: The group surveyed some of the most heavily affected neighborhoods, asking the remaining residents for information about those killed or injured.21 The BARR survey specifically asked people how many of the residents in a building died, where the survivors went after the earthquake, and the current location of the survivors if known. The survey focused on the hard-hit area of lower Port-au-Prince, which had a high concentration of heavily damaged houses. With these data, investigators were able to make some inferences about the number of people killed, the total number of people who went to camps, and the total living as absentees from earthquake-impacted houses, as well as the whereabouts of the absentees. Deaths per residence were calculated by using average occupancy per house and average death rate by damage characteristics of the houses. The area impacted by the quake had an estimated population of 3 million people. An estimate based on these findings suggests that between 46,190 and 84,961 people were killed in the earthquake.22
The LTL estimate is derived from a cluster survey: based on the interviews, the analysts extrapolated from their samples to estimate the overall mortality. Estimates based on cluster surveys (including this one) are necessarily imprecise, but the authors of the LTL report do suggest that the discrepancy between their estimate and that of the Haitian government cannot be accounted for by factoring in all potential errors in their method. Despite the large range of the LTL figure, it is sure to be more accurate than the official government assessment.
What would be the motivation for overstating the deaths? No one profits from disaster deaths very much, if at all, in any direct sense. Morticians don’t really make out because there is a sudden rush of business. Coffin makers may see a bump in their business; so might businesses that produce gravestones. But none of this is especially significant, and I am unaware of any instances of bribes or corruption in these businesses to take advantage of disaster mortality. Perhaps it happens.
Large profits were made by morticians who followed troops around the US Civil War battlefields, collected bodies, notified families, and sent the bodies back home in caskets made to the families’ specifications. Mostly fallen soldiers were buried by their comrades in shallow graves, and some article of identification, carried by soldiers for that express purpose, was sent home. Some morticians were unscrupulous in their fees, but most were doing a service that is now performed by military personnel. Stores like Macy’s had special sections for funeral attire and mourning clothing.
No one in Haiti made much directly from the disaster deaths. Very few of the thousands who died were attended to by morticians, and not many were buried in coffins in marked graves. But if the 300,000 figure was an intentional exaggeration to
elicit sympathy and donor contributions, it worked. By late 2013, ReliefWeb23 estimated the total donations at over $3.5 billion with a further $1 billion pledged. You would hardly call it profit for the country, but it was a large influx of money, especially in comparison with other disasters.
Elizabeth Ferris at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, analyzed the different levels of donation following the flooding in Pakistan in July of the same year and the Haitian quake24 and found that the level was far greater for Haiti than for Pakistan. While human losses were relatively small in Pakistan (1,539), physical losses were much greater—six times as many schools, four times as many hospitals, and ten times as many homes were damaged or destroyed. The Pakistan floods submerged one-third of the entire country. No matter how devastating, earthquakes are usually fairly confined in spatial extent compared to major floods.
Maybe the smaller donations to Pakistan resulted because it is a Muslim country and that makes many people nervous, given the way in which Muslims are often viewed by the media in the United States and other non-Muslim countries and the association with extremist movements. But most likely, I expect, it was the comparatively small number of deaths in Pakistan compared to those claimed in Haiti; deaths tend to prompt a more compassionate response than physical losses.
Natural disaster scenes are very often compared to war zones and vice versa. It really is difficult to tell the difference when looking at scenes of damage. That’s one reason why I used the analogy of a bombing raid to describe the fall of Port-au-Prince. The camps of earthquake survivors are essentially identical to those for people escaping conflict, though people in war zones may need more security.25
There was no way the residents of Port-au-Prince could have been warned. Earthquakes can’t be forecast, so there can be no shrill air-raid type siren telling of the seismic waves to come. No one in Haiti had undertaken earthquake safety training. First responders were not trained in rescue and recovery operations.
If you were there and had your wits about you, and you felt the first motions of the ground begin and you were near enough to the door of a building or happened to be outside, you might have run for the open spaces and suffered only minor injuries or none at all. But I expect few, if any, people in Port-au-Prince knew that it is buildings that kill people, not earthquakes.
The last time an earthquake of this magnitude had struck Haiti was in 1770, and it probably occurred on the same fault system as the 2010 earthquake. It destroyed much of what was Port-au-Prince at the time and took around 200 lives. The population of Port-au-Prince in 1770 is hard to guess, so that mortality figure may represent a significant fraction of the residents. It had been almost five lifetimes of the average Haitian since an earthquake had seriously rattled Port-au-Prince. There was no equivalent of a Major Risks Committee like that in Italy. Even if there had been one, what could it have said? Even if a mystic with the power of clairvoyance had made an exact prediction, what could the government of Haiti have done? Buildings can’t be rapidly retrofitted to be earthquake resistant.
Certainly, the overwhelming majority of buildings in Haiti were poorly built. Little shaking was needed to crumple them into a mass of fractured cement with jagged edges that could sever limbs. Remember that the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh collapsed on its own. The humble buildings of most Haitians had survived many hurricanes, disasters that recur and that people prepare for as best as they are able. Even so, hurricanes in Haiti often kill many hundreds of people.
In a rich country with a relatively effective government, like Italy, we could point the finger of blame at public officials, but not in Haiti. No one in government, ineffective though it is in Haiti, failed in their responsibility to issue a warning; no one misled the public about the risks. That’s not why people were unprepared, why so many died. None of the survivors will bring charges against Haitian government scientists who specialize in seismic risk—there are none. No one in government was to blame for the deaths in Haiti; poverty was to blame.
And it is simply not correct to say, though I have heard it many times, that Haiti has no building codes. After the Haiti earthquake, many claimed that the heart of the problem lay in lack of adequate building codes. Jonathan Katz,26 in the early part of his book, describes how he met then President Préval at the site of a school collapse that had occurred without any seismic activity months before the 2010 quake. The school collapse was similar to the Rana Plaza collapse in form and in tragedy (though many fewer were killed). New floors had been added to the building, which sat on a substrate that was too weak to hold the weight. The school collapsed without encouragement, just like Rana Plaza.
Katz asked Préval why there were no building codes. The president angrily answered that there were building codes. The problem, he insisted, was lack of a stable government. In other words, the government lacked the institutional capacity to enforce existing codes. So poor people build as cheaply as they can and once in 200 years suffer the consequences.
Shoddy building is by no means a peculiarly Haitian problem, nor is it always a reflection of a weak central government. Sometimes tragedies are caused by blatant violation of well-known building codes, combined with inadequate and corrupt oversight. Vastly fewer children, teachers, teaching assistants, and school nurses would have died in the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 had the buildings not been made of tofu dregs. China has been both criticized and praised for its rescue and reconstruction efforts after the quake. The World Bank, which helped finance the rebuilding, has a piece on its website titled “What China Got Right When Rebuilding after Sichuan.”27 China and the World Bank spent lavishly on the reconstruction and did not wait for a long time to get started. They devised a system of partnering with neighboring provinces that were not damaged, a reflection of a method adopted by the Kremlin during the Soviet era in which each unaffected state was assigned a specific role. More than 40,000 reconstruction projects were completed less than two years after the quake. Public buildings like schools and hospitals have now been built to high earthquake-resistance standards.
But an investigation by National Public Radio titled “Five Years after a Quake, Chinese Cite Shoddy Reconstruction” is much more critical.28 The crux of the article is that almost all the mistakes and malfeasance of the past have been repeated in an effort to rebuild quickly—build back fast rather than build back better. Construction is poor, corruption is high, building standards are not being met. Several new schools that were supposed to have been built to earthquake codes were heavily damaged in a quake in 2013. A national audit showed that $228 million of reconstruction money had been embezzled. Some officials have been convicted on corruption charges. Some claimed their districts were far more damaged than they actually were and took for themselves funds that weren’t needed. Eleven thousand farmers had their land appropriated for new housing, but there are still no buildings, and the government’s asking price for the land is 100 times what the farmers were paid. At the same time, reconstruction workers have not been paid.
The NPR version of the reconstruction story rings truer than the World Bank story. At least it fits the typical narrative reported by both the foreign press and Chinese journalists who have been able to get their messages out of the country. The earthquake came at a time when China was embarking on a spending stimulus package to boost the economy. A quarter of that money was spent on earthquake reconstruction; much of the rest went to national infrastructure. A real chance existed for a Schumpeter boost that would bring lasting benefit to those who suffered. But if the critics are right, new tofu dreg buildings have replaced the old, and the gale of destruction will again be tragic, not creative.
A rapid influx of reconstruction money is viewed as manna from heaven by the unscrupulous, a chance for new profits. In the aftermath of a terrible cataclysm of destruction, it is typical (though, as we will see later, not universal) for governments to want to rebuild as quickly as possible, as Ch
ina did. It is another way in which postconflict thinking modulates responses to disaster. The urge to reconstruct often overwhelms the need to be thoughtful and provide proper oversight. Postdisaster, local governments are stretched and normal government activities are challenged by reduced staff and weakened operational capacity. Postdisaster chaos opens up irresistible opportunities for the corrupt.
Corrupt profiteering is well known in zones of conflict. Sarah Chayes, in her book Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security,29 claims that conflict and corruption are so interactive that, while conflict provides opportunities for the corrupt, corruption itself may give rise to conflict. Her thesis is that ordinary, honest people get so frustrated with being shaken down by police and other government employees that they are vulnerable to taking up arms against the government.
Roger Bilham, whose work I mentioned in Chapter 2, is sure that corruption in the building industry is the leading cause of earthquake mortality in many countries, particularly in South Asia. In a paper in the journal Nature, written with Nicholas Ambraseys and provocatively titled “Corruption Kills,”30 Bilham lays out a case that the far most telling factor in predicting earthquake mortality is the intentional violation of building codes permitted by inspectors who are paid to look the other way.
The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer Page 9