January 12, 2010

2010 Haiti earthquake

The 2010 Haiti Earthquake Devastates Port-au-Prince and Nearby Cities

The earthquake wrecked the institutions that were supposed to organize the rescue. Ministries, hospitals and the UN mission headquarters were themselves disaster sites.

4:53 p.m., thirteen kilometres down

A moment-magnitude 7.0 earthquake ruptured at shallow depth near Léogâne at 4:53:10 p.m. local time on 12 January 2010. The current USGS solution puts it at 13 kilometres' depth with the epicentre 10 kilometres southeast of the town, at 18.443°N, 72.571°W.

The widely repeated time of 4:12 p.m. is wrong, and Port-au-Prince was not the epicentre; the capital lay east-northeast of the rupture and took catastrophic shaking.

Severe shaking devastated Port-au-Prince and communities including Léogâne, Carrefour and Jacmel, collapsing homes, hospitals, schools and government offices.

The responders were inside the collapsing buildings

The National Palace, the cathedral, the Ministry of Justice and numerous other government buildings were destroyed or heavily damaged, and water and electricity services almost entirely collapsed in the capital.

The Christopher Hotel, headquarters of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti, collapsed with approximately 100 personnel believed to have been inside. Mission chief Hédi Annabi and his deputy Luiz Carlos da Costa were among those killed.

Thirty of the 49 hospitals in the affected area were damaged or destroyed, and by nightfall survivors were sleeping outdoors amid aftershocks, rubble, severed services and blocked roads.

Why no single death toll is defensible

The Haitian government reported an estimate of 222,570 deaths to the UN and later raised its figures above 300,000. A peer-reviewed household survey put deaths through 4 March 2010 at 158,679, with a 95% confidence interval of 136,813 to 180,545; another conservative estimate gave 65,575.

About 300,000 injuries were reported. The post-disaster assessment counted 105,369 houses destroyed and 208,164 damaged, and later analysis mapped 23,567 landslides triggered by the quake.

Counts of people described as homeless, displaced, affected or living in camps measure different populations and are not interchangeable. Magnitude alone does not account for the losses either: shallow rupture, vulnerable construction, dense urban settlement and the simultaneous destruction of response institutions all drove them.

Sources

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What the sources leave uncertain

The earthquake’s date, time, and magnitude are secure, but published epicentral distances and depths differ because preliminary and later USGS solutions used different locations. The current catalog gives 13 km depth and a point 10 km southeast of Léogâne; contemporary material often described it as roughly 15–25 km southwest of Port-au-Prince.
The death toll will probably never be known. Haitian government estimates ranged above 217,000 and were later raised above 300,000, while method-based studies produced substantially lower figures, including 158,679 with a stated confidence interval and another conservative estimate of 65,575.
Counts of people described as homeless, displaced, directly affected, or living in camps measure different populations and should not be used interchangeably.
Magnitude 7.0 is a moment-magnitude value, not properly a “7.0 on the Richter scale.”