Haiti island unscathed by quake, but tourists stay away

by Clement Sabourin:

ILE A VACHE, Haiti (AFP) -- There are no blue-helmeted UN troops patrolling the streets of Ile a Vache, and schools on this picturesque island did not close after the massive earthquake that devastated much of the rest of the country.

Even as the rest of Haiti struggled to clear away debris and dispose of their dead, life after the quake has gone on as much as it did before for the 15,000 inhabitants of this unspoiled paradise.

The tiny island, off the southwest peninsula of Haiti a half-hour by boat from the town of Les Cayes, boasts among its many pleasures a vista of rolling hills and crystalline waters lapping its white-sand beaches.

But despite being spared the physical ravages of the quake, the island and its growing tourist industry also have been hit hard by the disaster.

"No tourists have come since the quake," said Didier Boulard, a Frenchman who says that not one stone fell out of place as a result of the temblor that leveled entire city blocks in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince.

Nevertheless the quake has brought financial disaster to Ile a Vache, he said.

"I've lost 47,000 dollars," said Boulard, who had high hopes for a 20-room hotel he opened nine years ago with a view over a small bay that served as a harbor for pirates during the 16th and 17th centuries.

With some 50 associates, Boulard invested 2.8 million dollars to open the first prime tourism establishment here -- today one of two hotels on this patch of land measuring only eight miles (13 kilometers) long and two miles (3.2 kilometers) wide -- and dared to celebrate last year when he "managed to turn a small profit".

The January 12 earthquake ended all that, killing as many as 300,000 people nationwide, leaving 1.3 million homeless and relegating Haiti to near the bottom of any vacation list.

At Haiti's big tourist destination of Jacmel, almost 500 people out of a population of 40,000 perished and a quarter of the tourist town's 700 hotel rooms were destroyed.

And though Ile a Vache emerged unscathed, even the thousands of UN and non-governmental organization expats sent in after the quake were banned, for security reasons, from taking breaks inside Haiti itself, so spent rest periods instead in the Dominican Republic right next door or on other islands like Guadeloupe or Martinique.

The fallout forced Boulard to trim his usual 40-member staff down to 25.

On a recent weekend, he had eight guests, including UN officials, humanitarian workers and journalists. Another recent visitor -- a rare bona fide "tourist" -- confessed that she came to Ile a Vache despite dire warnings from friends and relatives to stay away.

"Mine is the tourism of solidarity," said Canadian national Francine Leclerc.

"I've come here to spend my money in a country that needs it."

Over the years, however, travelers have been reluctant to flock to Haiti, with its periodic coups d'etat and natural disasters.

It is also the poorest country of the Americas -- generally not seen as a selling point for visitors who have dozens of tropical paradise destinations to choose from in the sun-drenched Caribbean.

Tourists were scared away two years ago by a succession of hurricanes that leveled a large swath of the island of Hispaniola, which Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic.

The tourism industry -- which could inject desperately needed revenue into Haiti's economy -- has also been hampered by a lack of infrastructure. For Ile a Vache, for example, the nearest air facility across the bay in Les Cayes is too small to welcome international flights.

Yet this island has a seductively languorous feel, making it unlike other Caribbean destinations. Its residents, descendents of African slaves and freed US blacks who immigrated in the 19th century after America's Civil War, still live to the rhythm of tropical sunsets, screeching cock fights and gurgling mynah birds.

This gives locals like Boulard hope that the unspoiled location might one day fulfill its destiny as tourist haven.

"The potential of tourism in Haiti is colossal." he said. "Neighboring countries welcome 10 million visitors each year," said the ever-hopeful Boulard.

May 3, 2010

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Bahamas Blog International

Haiti, without a palace too

Leticia Martínez Hernández

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti. — They say that only majestic place in the Haitian capital was its National Palace. The building, enormous and blindingly white, was yet another paradox in this country, immersed in abject poverty, but able to show off a palace in the style of the grand Petit Palais in Versailles.

History recounts that the National Palace took five years to be built, but it took barely one minute for it to be almost completely destroyed. The January 12 earthquake shook this Haitian national symbol mercilessly. This reporter went to the site and spoke with Fritz Longchamp, minister of the presidency, who was working together with his team in an improvised office in the shade of a tree.

Just a few hours after the tragedy struck, when the extent of the damage was not yet clear, everyone thought that, given the quake had affected the Palace so extensively, weaker buildings must have fared far worse. When our reporting team was visiting, even the helicopters flying overhead made the devastated walls shake.

Longchamp explained that the building’s three cupolas were destroyed; the left and center ones collapsed inward and the one on the right fell forward.

President René Préval’s office, the Council of Ministers room, the First Lady’s office and the meeting room were all buried when the roof collapsed. The central pavilion of columns was likewise demolished. During that collapse, at least four people were killed in the Palace’s central building, and another nine in the Presidential Guard headquarters, now virtually in ruins.

Thirty percent of the palace was destroyed, according to preliminary estimates. Longchamp said the proposal is to repair instead of demolish, because there are no structural problems.

“We would like to rebuild the cupolas, but this time, make them more earthquake-resistant.”

For that purpose, Haitian experts from the National Heritage Institute have been called upon to rebuild the Palace, together with Japanese and U.S. engineers and architects. They are currently assessing its structures and the patrimonial values that still remain among the debris.

The minister of the presidency, still sorrowful over the tragedy, emphasized that the Palace is very much a part of Haiti’s national identity, like its flag and shield.

Translated by Granma International

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Bahamas Blog International

Haiti's fault rupture boosts long-term risk of Jamaica quake

By Tom Randall and Meg Tirrell:


NEW YORK, USA (Bloomberg) -- The magnitude 7 earthquake that killed as many as 100,000 people in Haiti this week may increase the likelihood of a future quake in Jamaica, according to seismologists who study geologic risk.

When aftershocks subside in the coming weeks, Haiti’s prospects of another earthquake will plummet, while areas west along the same fault line will see increased seismic pressure, said Stuart Sipkin, a seismologist at the US Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado. It could take decades or a century for the pressure to rupture on the western edge of the fault in Jamaica.

A similar quake flattened the Haitian capital of Port-au- Prince 240 years ago, so long ago that most residents were unaware they were at risk, said Roger Musson, who advises engineers on regional dangers for the British Geological Survey. The 1770 upheaval was part of a string of westward-moving temblors that culminated in Jamaica in 1907, he said.

“In Haiti, there’s not been earthquakes in living memory; now it’s likely that the stress will be increased on the next segment along,” Musson, the agency’s head of seismic hazard, said in a telephone interview. However, he added, “You are constantly surprised by earthquakes doing things that they’re not supposed to do.”

Haiti lies near the eastern end of a fault line between the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates -- massive subterranean sections of the earth’s crust that move at about the speed that human fingernails grow, Sipkin said.

When the two passing tectonic plates get stuck together, pressure builds until it is relieved through a violent movement of earth, Sipkin said.

It probably took about 20 to 30 seconds for the fault to break, said Kate Hutton, a seismologist at the Seismological Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

“People probably felt it for longer,” Hutton said today in a telephone interview. “People’s perception of time slows down when they get really stressed.”

The Haiti earthquake was a “worst-case scenario,” a shallow rupture in the earth that ripped through a densely populated and poorly constructed city, said Pedro de Alba, professor of civil engineering at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. The depth of the rupture is important, because if it occurs deep in the earth, much of the energy is absorbed by rock, he said.

“A shallow earthquake is the worst possible kind,” de Alba said in a telephone interview today. “Pressure was building up for quite a long time.”

De Alba said the probability of a future quake west along the fault line has increased, “but to what extent we simply can’t predict.”

January 16, 2010

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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

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