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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.
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Telecom Reg’s Best Kept On the Books
When Connecticut land-use commissions update their regulations, it seems like a no-brainer to jettison old telecommunications regulations adopted decades ago during a short-lived period when municipalities had authority to regulate second generation (2G) transmissions prior to the Connecticut Siting Council (CSC) being ordered by a state court in 2000 to regulate all cell tower infrastructure as “functionally equivalent” services.
It is far better to update those regs instead, especially for macro-towers given new technologies like small cells. Even though only ‘advisory’ to the CSC, the preferences of towns by law must be taken into consideration in CSC decision making. Detailed telecom regs – not just a general wish list -- are evidence that a town has put considerable thought into where they prefer such infrastructure be sited without prohibiting service that many – though not all – citizens want and that first responders rely on for public safety.
Such regs come in handy when egregious tower sites are proposed in sensitive areas, typically on private land. The regs are a town’s first line of defense, especially when cross referenced to plans of conservation and development, P&Z regulations, and wetlands setbacks. They identify how/where the town plans to intersect with the CSC process. They are also a roadmap for service providers regarding preferred sites and sometimes less neighborhood contention. In fact, to have no telecom regs can weaken a town’s rights to protect environmental, scenic, and historic assets, and serve up whole neighborhoods to unnecessary overlapping coverage and corporate overreach. Such regs are unique to every town and should not follow anyone else’s boiler plate, especially industry’s.
Connecticut is the only state that has a centralized siting entity for cell towers. The good news is that applicants must prove need for new tower sites in an evidentiary proceeding and any decisions have the weight of the state behind them. The bad news is that the CSC used to be far less industry-friendly and rote in their reviews, which now resemble a check list. There is an operative assumption at CSC that if an applicant wants a tower, they must need it, otherwise why spend significant money to run the approval gauntlet? This reflects a subtle shift over the years at CSC from sincere willingness to protect the environment toward minimal tweaking of bad applications with minor changes. The bottom line is that towns really cannot rely on the CSC to do all the work for them.
What CSC issues telecom providers is a “certificate of environmental compatibility” after an evidentiary proceeding (not unlike a court case) with intervenors, parties, expert witnesses, and the service provider’s technical pro’s sworn in and subject to cross examination. Service providers get to do the same with any opposition from intervenor/party participants – like towns and citizens -- and their experts. It’s an impressive process whose ultimate goal is the fine balancing between allowing adequate/reliable public services and protecting state ecology with minimal damage to scenic, historic, and recreational values. They unfortunately often fall short of their mandate – like approving cell towers with diesel generators over town aquifers -- evidenced by CSC only rejecting about five cell towers in the past 15-20 years.
The CSC was founded in 1972 and clarified its mission in the 1980’s to prevent the state from being carved up willy-nilly by gas pipelines, high tension corridors, and broadcast towers. With the sudden proliferation of cell towers beginning in late 1990’s, it became the most sued agency in Connecticut by both an arrogant upstart industry if applications were denied and by towns/citizens when bad sites were forced on them. CSC gradually formed a defensive posture that drives their decisions toward industry with deeper pockets and attorneys on retainer.
For citizens, nothing can wreck one’s day like the CSC. It behooves towns to protect what little toolkit they have, and understand the legal parameters of the CSC’s playing field. The CSC is not a “normal” government agency where municipal/citizen redress is based on logic and local support. Their process is largely immune to everything but specific kinds of evidence – like town regs with setbacks/fall zones, radio frequency transmission signal strengths, sensitive areas identified, and detailed wildlife inventory, among others.
There is a current cell tower fight involving two intervening towns -- Washington and Warren; both with good cell tower regs – over a tower site within 1200’ of a Montessori School, near Steep Rock’s nature preserves with comprehensive geology/wildlife databases that include endangered, threatened and special concern flora and fauna, on established federal/state migratory bird flyways, within throwing distance to a historic site capable of being listed on the Underground Railroad, and with an access road on a blind curve entering a state highway that will permanently damage wetlands, vernal pools, and core forests. There are well credentialed environmental experts, including Dr. Michael Klemens, former chair of Salisbury’s P&Z, as well as the former director of migratory bird management at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and an RF engineer testifying to alternative approaches, plus three attorneys representing intervenors. It is the most professional challenge I have seen at CSC since Falls Village successfully mounted one that protected Robbins Swamps several years ago.
The hearing is ongoing, with uncertain results. To see what it takes today to stop an inappropriate tower siting, see Docket #543 under “Pending Matters” at https://portal.ct.gov/csc before removing local cell tower regs – the lowest hanging fruit that any town can possess in case it’s needed.
B, Blake Levitt is the Communications Director at The Berkshire-Litchfield Environmental Council. She writes about how technology affects biology.