So we always need to ask why buildings collapse and kill people. Buildings need not kill people. In Haiti, first and foremost, poverty, neglect of the poor, and lack of strong government cause people to be killed by buildings in earthquakes. But Haiti is also even more corrupt than China and falls near the bottom of corruption listings made by Transparency International.31 Yes, buildings collapse because they are poorly built, but to say buildings kill people is like saying that guns kill people, when it is people with guns in their hands who kill people.
After the first seismic waves reached Port-au-Prince, more destructive surface waves followed a few seconds later. Just what seismic energy feels like when it arrives unwelcome on your doorstep depends a lot on the nature of the fault on which the earthquake takes place. Faults are not much like a spherical pebble being dropped into still water. They are generally elongated features, more like a crack or a tear, so they don’t radiate energy equally in all directions. If you can imagine a fault with a more or less east-west orientation, it is very possible that the region north of the fault will shake more than that to the south or vice versa, and areas at one end may shake more than at the other. That was true when the Paganica Fault moved in the L’Aquila earthquake in Italy. The region to the southwest of that fault moved more than the region to the northeast. Unfortunately, the town of L’Aquila (pop. 73,000) is located to the southwest.
What’s more, passing through Earth is nothing like passing through a perfectly still pool of water. Earth is made up of an irregular mélange of rocks of different ages and types—some rigid, some soft—that break up, focus, and disperse seismic energy as it travels away from the site of the earthquake. Port-au-Prince wasn’t very far from the epicenter of the earthquake, but the energy arriving was broken up somewhat, arriving just a little sooner and stronger in some parts of the city than in others.
That’s part of the explanation for the variation in damage that the earthquake caused. But as every geotechnical engineer32 knows, there are many factors that go into determining how well a building will do when shaken by an earthquake. In fact, knowing an earthquake’s magnitude isn’t especially helpful. What matters is the amount the ground shakes where people are located. A large-magnitude earthquake many miles from a town will have much the same effect as a smaller earthquake much nearer to the town. Earthquakes as small as magnitude 2 can be felt if people are essentially on top of them.33 A more useful measure used by seismologists is peak ground acceleration (PGA), which describes the movement of the ground and is a much better predictor of damage.
A bizarre and perverse piece of “good” fortune can work in your favor if you live in a shanty in a slum. Your home may be so flimsy that if it shakes down on you, it won’t kill you. Most people can survive the impact of a few sheets of corrugated iron falling on them, but only luck will save you if a reinforced concrete building collapses on you. And oddly enough, flimsy structures may remain standing more than seemingly more rigid structures. That’s because they can sway a little with the motion of the ground. Everyone who has been high in a skyscraper in strong winds knows that they are built to give a little. Tall skyscrapers are designed to move several feet. A little yielding is a good thing. It prevents a buildup of stress and sudden failure. Newly constructed skyscrapers, like the 1,483-foot-tall Petronas Towers in earthquake-prone Kuala Lumpur, have elaborate bracing and absorbing systems, not unlike the shock absorbers in a car’s suspension, and they buffer the motion of an earthquake by allowing the structure to yield somewhat.
This idea is not new. In the rebuilding of Lisbon after the massive earthquake and tsunami of 1755, an elaborate bracing system of stout wooden beams—called the Pombaline cage after its inventor, the Marquês de Pombal, who led the rebuilding of the city—was designed to allow buildings to give a little when the ground shook. All new housing was required to be constructed around such cages. Some restaurants in Lisbon today display exposed parts of the original cage structure as a part of their decor.
What happened in Port-au-Prince? Everything that causes damage and death—poorly built buildings, weak ground conditions, weak governance, corruption, and poverty—came into play. You can find a description of the physical causes in the geotechnical extreme event reconnaissance (GEER) report made with funding from the National Science Foundation.34 This group surveyed 90,000 structures in the capital city, assessed the damage in relation to geology, soil conditions, and topography, and compared it to damage assessments made from satellite observation by the UN.35
The group found that severe damage was pervasive. That’s certainly the impression you get from looking at the UN satellite-based damage assessments of the city as a whole. It looks like hardly anyone, rich or poor, escaped. But, in fact, the satellite data suggest that only 9 to 12 percent of structures were completely destroyed; 7 to 11 percent were described as badly damaged; and 5 to 8 percent were moderately damaged. Even taking the upper end of these numbers, that is a total of 31 percent that suffered damage; 69 percent of structures suffered no damage at all. Taking the lower end of those ranges, you would conclude that maybe 79 percent of structures were undamaged.36 These satellite-based estimates are from UNISAT,37 the UN technology arm that provides support for relief and development. They are quite marvelous in the detail they show, but inevitably they can only reveal the damage visible from straight above. From ground-based observations, the GEER authors suggest that 30 percent of city structures suffered damage sufficient to be seen from above, but in places the actual damage could be much higher. That’s not a trivial loss of structures, but it is far less than the percentage of buildings lost in German cities firebombed by the Allies in World War II.
The other surprising observation in the GEER report is that the percentage of damage in shanty zones, high-density areas, and moderate-density areas was almost the same—28, 30, and 27 percent, respectively.
So just like estimates of mortality, it can be extremely difficult to get a true sense of how much physical damage actually takes place in a disaster. And you can’t trust the press. They will always show tight-focus images of the damage and not what survived undamaged.
In places, the GEER group saw distinct boundaries between areas of severe damage and areas hardly damaged at all. The report describes one case in this way: “The structures to the north [of an imaginary east-west line] are larger buildings that appear to be nice homes (some with swimming pools). They are also constructed on more gradual topography. Very few of these homes were damaged. The structures to the south are shanty-type structures, and the ones that are damaged most severely are located near the top of the hillsides/ridges. This could be evidence of ridge-top focusing of seismic energy.”38
Some “larger buildings that appear to be nice homes (some with swimming pools)” were quite badly damaged; they did not all escape. But reports from Mac McClelland,39 writing in Mother Jones, tell us that generally they suffered relatively little damage. That makes sense. The January 2010 earthquake was not so very large. While there is no strict seismological definition of “large” in regard to an earthquake, earthquakes of magnitude greater than 9.0 have been recorded, and the Haitian quake measured 7.0. About ten earthquakes of this magnitude occur each year on average. The Haitian quake compares in magnitude to two recent earthquakes in California: Loma Prieta in 1989, which killed 63 people (3,757 injured) and had about the same PGA, and Northridge in 1994, which killed 57 (over 8,700 injured) but had PGA values three times larger than those in Haiti.40
Those California earthquakes caused extensive damage to critical public infrastructure, private housing, and businesses, but they resulted in very low death tolls (if expressed as a percentage of population) compared to even the smallest plausible figure for Haiti. In the California earthquakes, the ratio of those injured to those who died is enormous compared to Haiti; this in part reflects the fact that services for the injured were much more available in California.
The number of injured, of course, counts only those who made it to a treatment center and had injuries serious enough to be prioritized for immediate treatment. In Haiti, many poor people had injuries that were never treated. Treatment of injuries relied almost entirely on foreign assistance because there was so little local capacity. Just how many injured Haitians went untreated is impossible to know. So the injury total in Haiti is the total of serious injuries, while in California, with its well-functioning emergency response capability, a higher percentage of the injured are likely to have been counted and treated.
How did the different groups of people in Haiti cope? Did the blans suffer along with the negs, unifying them in their common plight? The answer is absolutely not.
If you were in the Haitian elite, your fate was not unlike that of a well-to-do Californian. In fact, your life wasn’t very different in most ways. You might have been injured, but probably not seriously. By and large, if you have a lot of money to put into a home to live in (even if you don’t live there full time), you have it built well, meaning strongly and with high-quality materials. Hurricanes are common, so you build to resist hurricanes; as an unintended benefit, you make the house somewhat more earthquake resistant as well.
And if you were injured in your mansion in Pétionville, you were attended to quickly. The elite have never relied on Haitian government services for anything, especially anything to do with their health, and were treated by private doctors living in the same neighborhood.
After the earthquake, if your house needed repairs, you had money to pay for them without straining your budget, and you were able to effect repairs quite quickly. You didn’t rely on any assistance from the government or international agencies. You probably left Haiti with your family and left your home guarded and didn’t return until things were back in shape. You may even have had a choice of several other homes to go to.
So just as a country’s wealth provides a potential shield against the worst that a natural disaster can do, an individual’s wealth also provides a shield. What is disaster to some is nothing more than an inconvenience to others.
The “other homes” to which nonwealthy Haitians retreated were blue tents provided by the UN or one of a multitude of NGOs. Other Haitians stayed in the yards of their homes and slept outdoors, much as the residents of L’Aquila did. Aid organizations have an aversion to using the word refugee to describe people forced out of their homes by natural disasters. According to the UN definition, refugees are people who have been forced to leave their country by actual or perceived threats.41 Definitions matter. People who move inside their borders are considered “internally displaced persons.” Nevertheless tent cities, like those occupied by tens of thousands of the poor of Haiti, are often described as refugee camps because, for all intents and purposes, that’s what they are. They are indistinguishable from the camps set up for refugees from conflicts or oppression.
Too often the help disaster survivors get is meager. Their shelters are often hardly even tents. More likely they are sheets of plastic stretched over sticks. One and a half million or so people took refuge in 1,500 camps after Haiti’s 2010 quake, and at the end of 2013, roughly 150,000 still lived that way, their homes still in ruin.42 Others lived in the remnants of their homes. It’s not so obvious which is better. Life was hard enough in the slums of Port-au-Prince before the earthquake; it became immeasurably worse after.
Desperate people do desperate things. The rate of violence is always highest in the poorest places, especially when poverty is linked in the public mind-set with injustice. In the United States, violence on Native American reservations is 2.5 times higher than the national average, and alcoholism is rampant.43 Before Katrina struck, the murder rate in the poor parts of New Orleans was ten times higher than the national average.44
In places where rape and other violent crimes are common and seldom prosecuted, and where people are deprived of basic social services and employment, safety, and the rudiments of governance, the aftermath of disaster can be especially grim. Those who suffer most will be those who are the least well regarded in normal times.
Haiti had always been a place where women and young girls were at high risk of rape and other forms of sexual violence; it was common and difficult to prosecute and control. But after the earthquake, in the tent cities and around Port-au-Prince, sexual violence surged to ghastly levels. It is one of the saddest stories of life in Haiti after the earthquake. There was nowhere in the world where a young woman was at greater risk of rape.45 Why?
The dictators “Papa Doc” and his son “Baby Doc” Duvalier used rape as a weapon of oppression, but they were far from the only ones to do so. US soldiers are known to have indiscriminately raped women and children during the occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and to have kept women as sex slaves.46 After the Duvaliers’ regime came to an end, Raoul Cédras used rape as a way to suppress opposition to his regime by supporters of the populist president Jean-Bertrande Aristide, whose ouster Cédras had helped to engineer. Rape and threats of rape are one of life’s many challenges for Haitian women.
But why do incidences of rape rise after a disaster? Don’t think it happens only in poor places with weak or despotic governance. Instances of violence (not only sexual) rose strongly after the Loma Prieta earthquake in California, and Hurricane Katrina brought many forms of misery to the poorest people of New Orleans, including an increased risk of rape and domestic violence. Disaster rape is, it seems, something to be expected. It is so common, in fact, that the US National Criminal Justice Reference Service publishes a guide for the prevention of and response to sexual violence in disasters.47
The incidence of rape in Haiti also rose after other shock events. In 2006 Athena Kolbe and Royce Hutson published a controversial paper in the highly prestigious medical journal Lancet. They used survey data (1,260 households, 5,720 individuals) from Port-au-Prince families to establish that in the 22-month period following the 2004 coup that ousted President Aristide, an estimated 8,000 murders took place and 35,000 people were raped; more than half the victims were girls under the age of 18.48 The perpetrators were most often common criminals, but victims also identified as perpetrators a significant number of political actors as well as UN and other peacekeepers.
These same researchers plus eight colleagues published similar findings about the upsurge in crime and rights violations after the 2010 earthquake.49 They estimated that nearly 10,500 women and girls were raped in the aftermath.
Most accounts of sexual crime after disasters posit that the cause is loss of social order, and the two papers just mentioned support that. This proposed cause of the upsurge in rape supposes that men are held back in their persistent desire to rape by forces of law; during the disaster these forces are removed, diminished, or diverted to other responsibilities, such as search and recovery. Much the same argument is used to account for looting50—we are all suppressed thieves just waiting for the cops to be distracted so we can grab luxury goods at will from upscale stores and take them home or sell them. And we will invade other people’s homes as well, not just stores.
Would most men really be tempted to rape just because the opportunity presents itself and there is virtually no chance of being caught? Does this include men who have never done such a thing before? Could that explain the postdisaster rise in sexual assaults?
I find that idea hard to fathom and hard to live with if it is true. Certainly for some in the desperate slums of Cité Soleil, rape was a part of everyday life. If you had been encouraged and perhaps even paid to use rape as a way of domination for political reasons or personal gain or to suppress a group ethnically different from yourself, this behavior could have become normal. And, as noted, violence is often highest in the poorest places because many lack institutions to enforce rule of law.
But I believe that there is something else beyond this “time bomb” view of the poor. Remember that the w
ord neg is a form of derision, a term used by the elite as a way to slander poor people (though not exclusively) and associate them with criminal actions. Negs are portrayed as thieves at the best of times; in a disaster, it is believed that they will rise up as a looting mob. Therefore, vicious actions to suppress them are justified. If you are a poor neg in Haiti and you are seen looting, or even suspected of looting, you can expect to be shot dead—possibly by a UN peacekeeper.
That was the fate of 15-year-old Fabienne Cherisma. The loot she made off with comprised three framed pictures.51 In color images of the scene, you can see that the picture facing upward is of brightly colored flowers in a vase.52 For stealing these pictures, she was shot in the head, presumably by a policeman, and died instantly.
Numerous versions of this image can be found online. In one, the girl’s anguished mother is seen being restrained by friends. In another widely circulated image, no less than seven news photographers are seen in a group just a few feet from the body, crouched in the classic photographers’ pose, getting close-up pictures of the girl’s face.53 The photographers must have come to the scene in a crazed rush, because even though they are down the slope from Fabienne (that must have been the best angle), blood has yet to flow down the incline from her head, beneath the framed pictures. The person who shot Fabienne is unknown and will likely remain unknown.54
Figure 3.1
Fabienne Cherisma, a 15-year-old girl, was shot and killed by police for stealing three framed pictures after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
Source: Photograph by Edward Linsmier. Used with permission.
How could anyone think the crime Fabienne committed would merit punishment by death, without being charged and without a trial? The person who carried out the death sentence could not have believed that she was a threat of any sort. The sentence and its execution are so vile we want to believe the scene is not from our world. But this sort of punishment is more than permitted; it is the norm and is encouraged in the aftermath of a disaster in poor countries. That punishment is yours if you are poor in Haiti and you want some colorful pictures to brighten up your home in the slums.
The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer Page 10