Why did so many die in Haiti?

We have all seen the horrific images of bodies piled by the roadside in Haiti. We’ve all heard the pleas for help, the concerned journalists who step amongst the bodies, shoving microphones in suffering faces, hand water (on camera) to a child or watch plane and boat loads of materiel arriving as aid.

What continues to puzzle me is this: Why did so many people die? The buildings in Haiti are, for the most part, low structures. When compared to the Kashmir region in India/Pakistan, which had a much stronger quake in 2008, the death toll is 10 times higher per capita, so what happened?

Some of this can be blamed on the type of housing — the cheaper, the faster — in an impoverished country. Part of this can be blamed, as David Brooks pointed out in The New York Times, on micro-aid brought on by more NGO charities per capita than any other nation on earth — micro-aid dispensed hand-to-hand instead of macro-aid doled out to improve the infrastructure and viability of the whole country. And we have all heard the nonsense of the Bible-thumpers who want to blame the devil.

There is no doubt that better buildings may have saved many more lives. If the same quake had hit, say, Orange County in California (south of Los Angeles), where most homes are one or two stories, the better building codes would have prevented as many as 65 percent of the serious injuries.

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But that still does not account for the incredible death rate in Haiti from an earthquake that was hardly the strongest compared to other regions in the recent past. There are reports that hundreds of people were found dead without a scratch on them, except for bruised skin as they collapsed. What can cause this violent a death, a death by shaking?

It seems there are different kinds of earthquakes, as different as a hurricane is to a tornado. This one was like a tornado, a huge tornado. This one ran along what is called a “slip-strike fault.�

Eric Calais, Purdue University professor of geophysics, summed it up this way: “It’s a horizontal motion of two pieces of the earth’s crust on either side of a vertical crack in the earth. That is very similar to the San Andreas Fault in California, for example. That is the way that fault operates as well.�

This fault in Haiti also runs beneath the Dominican Republic. They had a bad one in 1946 that caused a tsunami (tidal wave). And both parts of the island were affected in past centuries, but no one knows how many died back then.

“The main factor is the earthquake’s size,� said Stuart Sipkin, a seismologist at the U.S. Geological Survey. “But then there is also the earthquake depth. This was a very shallow earthquake, which means it would tend to be more destructive. And then there’s the proximity to where people live.�

“The city of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, is essentially built on that fault,� said Calais.

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When you couple cheap, shoddy housing, a dense population living on a slip-strike fault, an earthquake of 8 or more on the Richter scale, you have a recipe for disaster. People can die standing up, in the clear. There is no doubt that the prime reason for the number of deaths in Haiti can only be the fault of the geography: buildings and living on a slip-strike fault.

What a mistake that is. What a mistake building on that sister slip-strike fault is: the San Andreas. When disaster strikes, it will be no use pretending we did not know what could happen. Like the levee walls in New Orleans, we have plenty of examples and scientists who know, already, what the dangers are. But will we listen?

Peter Riva, formerly of Amenia Union, lives in New Mexico.