Lessons from Port au Prince, Haiti

By Jean H Charles:


Driving from Port au Prince into the hill of Bourdon, towards the bucolic and attractive suburb of Petionville, one is captivated by the sheer beauty of the setting: a gentle mountain with a deep ravine on the right side, beautiful mansions on the left, with wild ginger plants with their giant red and pink flowers serving as a fence. The guardrail on the side of the road is muted into a moving museum or an art gallery filled with object d’arts of all genres, pots with hand designed motifs, painting and iron works well suited for outdoor gardens. The Haitian artists are turning what they do best, one piece of art after another better and prettier than the previous one; all these creative endeavors at dirt cheap price.

But amongst that splendor, perched on the hill is the vignette of one of the slums that surround the city of Port au Prince. I have often asked how come this disturbing view does not lead to affirmative action to bring about effective use of zoning laws to protect the mountain against possible avalanche. Haitian officials as well as expatriates from the international organizations take that road daily towards their villas into the nooks and the hooks of the many mountains that bring you from the tropical temperature of the littoral sea to the temperate cool weather of the elevated altitude in less than half an hour’s time. There are certainly some lessons that can be taken from the Port au Prince earthquake.

Lesson one: be aware of the ostrich game, it will come back to haunt you!

The growing expansion of the slum named Jalousie, Tokyo, Brooklyn, and Cite Soleil, by the whimsical Haitian people is such a visible abscess that one could not miss them. Action should have been taken to relocate the thousands of Haitian people migrating from the neglected countryside into the city to taste a piece of the illusory pie made of neon light, fast moving cars and a possible job as a gardener or hustler and bustler to get the daily bread. They are also the lumping rod used by the politicians or the government to whip those with opposing views. The extreme misery of the majority of Haitian people before 1/12/10 requested urgent action and responsible measures to alleviate the condition of life of millions. The measures suggested by the international organizations (World Bank, International Monetary Fund, etc.) and adopted by the Haitian government have produced dismal results, which strangely resembles the outpouring of resources and the lack of elementary tools at the makeshift hospitals to save patients that need not die after the earthquake.

Lesson two: the Joseph and the Pharaoh story are still alive today.

The bible in its old testament gave us the story of Joseph being advised by God in a dream to notify the Pharaoh of Egypt that the country and the surrounding areas will endure seven years of drought. The Pharaoh was wise enough to appoint Joseph as his prime minister who engineered a policy of saving enough grain to last the hard times and even sell the surplus to the neighboring nations.

The Haitian government was advised two years ago by three foreign and two native scientists that a possible seismic event could strike the city of Port au Prince in the near future; due diligence should have been taken for protective measures that could save lives and limb. A similar disaster in Cuba or in the United States would not result in such a big loss of human lives: two hundred thousand and counting.

The Caribbean plate that strikes Port-au- Prince extends all the way through Kingston Jamaica; a similar plate in the North, the Atlantic plate, goes into the city of Santiago, Dominican Republic. Those two governments must not follow the Haitian pattern of faking due diligence. Preventive measures in health, environmental and food security should be taken as soon as possible and as a way of life.

Lesson three, the politics of make believe can only strike back on your own face.

The United States, because of its proximity to and the strength of its commerce with Haiti, is in the best position to take the lead in the recovery effort. Having decided to do so, it has the moral obligation to exercise due diligence in demonstrating its leadership. It cannot hide behind the incompetence of the Haitian government or the ineptness of the United Nations to justify, the errors, the excuses and the mishaps in the ill-advised logistics of the burial of the dead and the delivery of food, water and medicine.

The poor handling of the bodies as ordinary garbage, the fight in getting food and water, the allocation of priorities of who should land first in the congested Port au Prince airport, the decision to organize tent cities instead of starting the rebuilding of Haiti through the relocation to and the renaissance of the 140 small towns are all decisions that will produce donor fatigue and in the long run postpone or forestall the Haitian recovery.

Lesson four: count your friends at the funeral parlor.

In bad times you know who your real friends are! The Haitian community has, akin to the rest of the Caribbean, a sizable Arab community made up of Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians and Palestinians. They provide a useful outlet for commerce and business. In Haiti they own and run the supermarkets and the wholesale delivery of canned and foreign food. Some of them have also lost their lives and their enterprise.

I have not seen the rush of the Arab governments in lending a hand to Haiti and to their expatriate citizens. Without going into an Arab-Israeli conflict, the disproportionate call to help by Israel is noticeable in light of the very few Israeli citizens residing in Haiti. The mobile hospital sent by the government of Israel was the first one to be deployed and taking care of the sick and the injured in the disaster.

Lesson five: when the disease is in a terminal phase one needs the intervention of a specialist to bring about incremental progress.

The case of Haiti is apropos. The ailments in environmental degradation, food insecurity, and dismal health practice and poor infrastructure is so systemic that it needs a minimum of good governance that goes beyond simple electioneering. Haiti has developed through the years the practice of choosing the worst leaders to lead its destiny; under the pretext of nationalism some of its presidents have sold the country’s sovereignty to remain in power. It is now time for Haiti to choose a leader that will bring about true hospitality to the majority of its citizens.

The Port au Prince earthquake is now labeled as of one of the major disasters of recent history. So many lives need not be lost, if there was a minimum of good governance in the country. The recovery will be hard and painful and the Haitian people are thorough and resilient. It will not happen, though, if lessons are not taken, caring on the ground not demonstrated, and purposeful leadership not exhibited.

January 30, 2010

caribbeannetnews

Bahamas Blog Internaional

Haiti quake was nightmare waiting to happen say scientists

By Richard Ingham:



PARIS, France (AFP) -- The quake that hit Haiti on Tuesday was a killer that had massed its forces for a century and a half before unleashing them against a wretchedly poor country, turning buildings into death traps, experts said on Wednesday.

Scientists painted a tableau of horror, where natural forces, ignorance and grinding poverty had conspired to wreak a death toll tentatively estimated by Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive at more than 100,000.

The 7.0-magnitude quake occurred very close to the surface near the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, leaving almost no natural buffer to soften the powerful shockwave, these experts said.

"It was a very shallow earthquake, occurring at a depth of around 10 kilometers (6.2 miles)," seismologist Yann Klinger of the Institute of the Physics of the Globe (IPG) in Paris told AFP.

"Because the shock was so big and occurred at such a shallow depth, just below the city, the damage is bound to be very extensive," he said.

The US Geological Survey (USGS) said the quake occurred at 2153 GMT on Tuesday 15 kms (9.4 miles) southwest of Port-au-Prince.

It happened at a boundary where two mighty chunks of the Earth's crust, the Caribbean plate and the North America plate, rub and jostle in a sideways, east-west movement.

The USGS said the rupture occurred on the "Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden fault system," a slow-moving fault that last unleashed a large quake in 1860. Prior major events to that were in 1770, 1761, 1751, 1684, 1673 and 1618.

Sandy Steacey, director of the Environmental Science Research Institute at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, said the high death toll could be pinned overwhelmingly to construction.

"It's a very, very poor country without the building codes. Probably the fact that earthquakes (there) are very infrequent contributes in a way, because it's not a country that is focussed on seismic safety.

"Looking at the pictures, essentially it looks as if (the buildings are of) breeze-block or cinder-block construction, and what you need in an earthquake zone is metal bars that connect the blocks so that they stay together when they get shaken," said Steacey.

"In a wealthy country with good seismic building codes that are enforced, you would have some damage, but not very much."

French seismologist Pascal Bernard, also at the IPG, said that, given the nature of the fault, there was a "sizeable probability" that another large quake could occur in the same region within a matter of years.

Like other faults around the world, the Haitian crack is well known for domino activity, in which the release of pressure on one stretch piles on pressure in an adjoining stretch, bringing it closer to rupture.

In Haiti's case, the likeliest spot of a bust would be to the east of Tuesday's quake, Bernard said.

Asked whether another big quake was in the offing, Roger Searle, a professor of geophysics at Durham University, northeast England, said, "In the coming years, almost surely."

"We know pretty much where earthquakes occur, they've been mapped themselves and we can map faults and so on.

"The difficulty is it's very, very hard to predict when they will occur, because the network is so complex.

"It's a bit like making a pile of stones. You put more on the pile and it gets steeper and steeper and sooner or later the thing is going to collapse but you never which stone is going to do it and just where it's going to start to fail."

January 14, 2010

caribbeannetnews

Bahamas Caribbean Blog International