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

caribbeannetnews

Bahamas Blog International

Up to 300,000 people killed in Haiti quake, says UN

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AFP) -- Haiti's devastating January 12 earthquake killed between 250,000 and 300,000 people, the head of the United Nations mission in the country said Thursday.

Until now, the Haitian government death toll was more than 220,000.

April 21 "marked the 100th day since the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti, leaving between 250,000 and 300,000 people dead," said Edmond Mulet, the head of the UN mission in Haiti.

Mulet also said that 300,000 people were wounded in the disaster, and more than one million people were left homeless.

The 7.0-magnitude quake left much of Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince in ruins, destroying infrastructure and the seat of government and causing a humanitarian catastrophe in a country already considered the poorest in the Americas.

Mulet, speaking at a press conference, said that he wants the UN Security Council to send an extra 800 police officers to provide safety in the refugee camps.

"In the history of humanity one has never seen a natural disaster of this dimension," said Mulet, adding that the Haiti quake death toll was twice the toll of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II.

Mulet said that the next 12 to 18 months will be "critical," noting that peacekeepers in the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) will focus on five areas: helping support the government organize quick elections, coordinate "post-disaster" humanitarian aid, provide general security, support the Haitian government in carrying out its reconstruction plan, and "help Haiti rebuild its human capital."

Concerning security, Mulet said MINUSTAH forces will help the Haitian National Police have "a more visible presence" to help the tens of thousands of people living in 1,200 refugee camps.

Mulet, a native of Guatemala, took over the UN mission on March 31, replacing Tunisian Hedi Annabi, who was killed in the quake.

If the Security Council accepts Mulet's recommendations, the overall number of UN police in Haiti will rise to 4,391.

When the MINUSTAH peacekeeping soldiers are also counted -- though Mulet has not asked for an increase in this force -- the total UN force would reach 13,300 supported by more than 2,000 civilians.

Separately, Mulet said the Haitian government on Thursday ordered a three-week moratorium on the forced evacuation of refugees camping out on private land, schools or markets.

For nearly two weeks, the authorities and private property owners have urged people squatting on their property to leave.

More than 7,000 people who took refuge at the Port-au-Prince stadium were moved out 10 days ago, and last week some 10,000 Haitians living in a school were ordered out.

"There are students that want to return to their schools to continue their studies, and there are refugees living in the schools. So in order to avoid clashes, a moratorium was established," Mulet said.

UN officials have opened two refugee camps on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince in order to accept some 10,000 refugees currently in danger of being affected by flooding as the Caribbean rainy season is set to begin.

Mulet also said that Haiti "is going on the right path" towards reconstruction, and that he was showing "prudent optimism." He also urged people to "not underestimate the size of the task and the challenges that Haiti faces."

April 23, 2010

caribbeannetnews

Bahamas Blog International

Haiti warned to brace for another big quake

By Mica Rosenberg:


PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Reuters) -- Haiti should be preparing for another major earthquake that could be triggered by the catastrophic one last month which killed up to 200,000 people and left the capital Port-au-Prince in ruins, experts say.

Teams of geophysicists, who have been tracking movements in the fault line that slashes across Haiti and into the Dominican Republic, came to the nation last week to measure changes in the Earth's crust after the 7.0-magnitude quake on January 12.

Increased pressure on the fault after the quake could unleash another of the same size or bigger, although scientists acknowledge they have no way of knowing exactly when or where it will hit.

"Faults are always waiting for the right moment but if another earthquake gives them a little kick they go before their time," said Eric Calais, a professor of geophysics from Purdue University in Indiana, who is leading the seismology project in Haiti.

Preliminary calculations by his group show the January 12 quake could be the "little kick" that sets off another temblor along the 186 mile fault where two regional tectonic plates have been scraping together for millions of years.

More than 50 aftershocks, including one measuring 5.9 magnitude, have shaken Port-au-Prince after last month's quake. The US Geological Survey says the aftershock sequence will continue for months, "if not years", and "damaging earthquakes will remain possible in the coming months".

Calais was due to take his findings to a meeting on Monday with President Rene Preval and the head of the United Nations mission in Haiti, in which he would stress the urgent need to rebuild the city's critical infrastructure safely and quickly.

Haiti's government has announced plans to relocate up to half a million homeless quake victims -- many now camped out in rubble-strewn streets -- in temporary villages outside of Port-au-Prince. But some experts suggest the whole capital should be rebuilt away from the dangerous fault line.

Calais was part of a group of experts who warned Haitian officials in 2008 that there could be a 7.2 magnitude quake on the horizon.

But Haitian officials said there was not enough time or funds to shore up the impoverished Caribbean's country's shoddy construction or take precautions, and in last month's quake, many buildings pancaked, their bricks crumbling to dust.

"It's not too late. Now is the time to really get serious about this," Calais said.

Over 200 years ago, when Haiti saw its last major earthquake, there were actually several temblors in a row, two in 1751 and another in 1770, Calais said.

In one destroyed neighborhood in the Haitian capital, where people now live in tents made of bed sheets and sticks, curious children watched the scientists set up specialized global positioning systems. The devices, placed at different points along the fault, will gather data over three days and compare it to information gathered over the past five years.

But for all the precise measurements, there is no such thing as an exact science of earthquake prediction.

Haiti's national geological survey offices collapsed in the quake, killing some 30 people inside, including the institute's director. This complicates future research in a country that has no seismic network, except for Calais' GPS monitors.

"Scientists are blind when it comes to this earthquake ... We rely on data that is coming from stations that are far away," he said.

"It's like if you go to your doctor and the only thing we can do is look at you with binoculars -- so the diagnostic would be pretty poor."

February 2, 2010

caribbeannetnews

Bahamas Blog International

Haiti must learn to live with earthquakes, experts say

By Jordi Zamora:


PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AFP) -- It will be difficult to convince Haitians to spend extra money and rebuild their quake-ravaged country with structures able to withstand another powerful earthquake, experts said Friday.

Some 170,000 people were killed in the devastating January 12 quake that toppled weak buildings across the Haitian capital.

Two fault lines run under the island of Hispaniola, which Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic, but Haitians have long forgotten about the danger of earthquakes.

"Between six and eight generations of people have gone by who lived with no awareness of earthquakes," Haitian engineer Hans Zennid told AFP.

The previous earthquakes known to have struck the island nation took place in 1742, 1772 and 1842, said Zennid. The 1842 quake was so devastating it forced the government to move the capital from Cap Haitien to its current location.

Despite the devastation, President Rene Preval has said that Port-au-Prince will continue being Haiti's capital.

The presidential palace, built in the 1920s, the Congress building, and virtually every ministry building collapsed when the magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck.

However an 11-floor building belonging to the telephone company towers over the rubble, largely intact.

Zennid was the engineer responsible for making sure that building was earthquake-ready.

"From the start I planned to make the building strong enough to resist a magnitude 6.0 earthquake, because the possibilities of a 7 (magnitude) like the one that just happened is something that happens every 150 years," said Zennid, as he surveyed the building.

A report by US structural engineers giving people the green light to use the building is posted at the entrance, perhaps to ease the fears of workers desperately seeking a semblance of normality. The report said that only one of the pillars suffered minimum damage.

Zennid said he increased the building's strength after a soil analysis.

"When we began to lay the building foundation and I analyzed the soil quality, I added 20 percent to the security level, which allowed it to resist a 7.3," he said.

That meant adding 15 percent more reinforced concrete and steel to the foundation, which meant increasing the cost by some 150,000 dollars.

At first his employers "were upset, but in the end they accepted the price increase," he said.

Haiti's elegant presidential palace can be rebuilt on the same site, even keeping the same style, Zennid said, but engineers will have to completely re-work the building's foundation.

That also applies to the vast majority of homes in Port-au-Prince, including the most luxurious mansions and hotels, many of which collapsed when the quake struck, he said.

As in most underdeveloped countries, even rich Haitians tend to expand their homes in stages instead of building them according to a single, structurally sound blueprint.

In order to do that builders need a large pot of money, and "there is no tradition of home loans here," said French architect Christian Dutour, who has carried out several projects in Haiti.

It will be difficult to explain the importance of proper building codes to a population that overwhelmingly lives below the poverty line.

In the noisy, chaotic streets of Port-au-Prince, street vendors are already selling metal rods salvaged from the earthquake rubble.

According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), which tracks earthquakes around the world, Haiti's quake could represent the beginning of a new cycle of earthquakes after nearly 170 years of geological peace.

The quake's epicenter was just 25 kilometers (15 miles) from Haiti and struck at a very shallow depth of 13 kilometers (eight miles).

The USGS estimated recently that there was a 25 percent probability that one or several magnitude 6 aftershocks could strike in the coming weeks, although they will space out more and more over time.

The January 12 quake freed much of the tension accumulated on one portion of the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault, which runs along the southern portion of Hispaniola -- but another segment east of the epicenter and adjacent to Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince has barely moved, according to the USGS.

"We are sitting on a powder keg," geologist Claude Prepetit, an engineer from the Haitian Mines and Energy bureau, told AFP.

"We are faced with the threat of future earthquakes and have to decentralize, and depopulate Port-au-Prince," he said.

January 30, 2010

caribbeannetnews

Bahamas Blog International

Chavez says US 'occupying Haiti' in name of aid

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) -- Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez on Sunday accused the United States of using the earthquake in Haiti as a pretext to occupy the devastated Caribbean country and offered to send fuel from his OPEC nation.

"I read that 3,000 soldiers are arriving, Marines armed as if they were going to war. There is not a shortage of guns there, my God. Doctors, medicine, fuel, field hospitals, that's what the United States should send," Chavez said on his weekly television show. "They are occupying Haiti undercover."

"On top of that, you don't see them in the streets. Are they picking up bodies? ... Are they looking for the injured? You don't see them. I haven't seen them. Where are they?"

Chavez promised to send as much gasoline as Haiti needs for electricity generation and transport.

A perennial foe of US "imperialism," Chavez said he did not wish to diminish the humanitarian effort made by the United States and was only questioning the need for so many troops.

The United States is sending more than 5,000 Marines and soldiers to Haiti, and a hospital ship is due to arrive later this week.

The country's president said US troops would help keep order on Haiti's increasingly lawless streets.

Venezuela has sent several planes to Haiti with doctors, aid and some soldiers. A Russia-Venezuela mission was set to leave Venezuela on Monday carrying aid on Russian planes.

Chavez said Venezuela's planes were the first to land in Haiti after Tuesday's 7.0 magnitude earthquake, which wrecked the capital Port-Au-Prince and killed as many as 200,000 people.

January 18, 2010

caribbeannetnews

Bahamas Caribbean Blog International

Caricom blocked from landing in Haiti

BY RICKEY SINGH Observer Caribbean correspondent:





BRIDGETOWN, Barbados -- The Caribbean Community's emergency aid mission to Haiti, comprising heads of government and leading technical officials, failed to secure permission Friday to land at that devastated country's airport, now under the control of the USA.

Consequently, the Caricom "assessment mission" that was to determine priority humanitarian needs resulting from the mind-boggling earthquake disaster last Tuesday had to travel back from Jamaica to their respective home destinations.

On Friday afternoon, the US State Department confirmed signing two Memoranda of Understanding with the Government of Haiti that made "official that the United States is in charge of all inbound and outbound flights and aid offloading".

Further, according to the agreements signed, US medical personnel "now have the authority to operate on Haitian citizens and otherwise render medical assistance without having to wait for licences from Haiti's Government".

Prior to the US taking control of Haiti's airport, a batch of some 30 Cuban doctors had left Havana, following the earthquake, to join more than 300 of their colleagues who have been working there for more than a year.

Last evening, the frustration suffered by the Caricom mission to get landing permission was expected to be raised in a scheduled meeting at Jamaica's Norman Manley International Airport between Jamaica's Prime Minister Bruce Golding and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Golding, who was making arrangements for the meeting with Clinton, following her visit earlier in the day to witness the devastation of the capital Port-au-Prince, said he could not comment on details to be discussed.

He, however, told this correspondent: "I appreciate the chaos and confusion at Haiti's airport, where there is just one operational runway. But Haiti is a member of Caricom and we simply have to be facilitated and the truth is there is hardly a functioning government in Haiti."

Asked whether the difficulties encountered by the Caricom mission may be related to reports that US authorities were not anxious to facilitate landing of aircraft from Cuba and Venezuela, Prime Minister Golding said he could "only hope that there is no truth to such immature thinking in the face of the horrific scale of Haiti's tragedy".

Golding, who has lead portfolio responsibility among Caricom leaders for external economic relations, got a first-hand assessment of the damage when he flew to Haiti on Thursday.

A contingent of some 150 members of the Jamaica Defence Force has since established a camp with medical facilities in the vicinity of Haiti's airport.

Ahead of last evening's scheduled meeting with Clinton, Prime Minister Golding had discussed on Friday in Kingston some of the problems to be overcome at a meeting with the prime ministers of Barbados and Dominica and the Community's secretary general Edwin Carrington.

Carrington explained that proper use of the Norman Manley Airport would be consistent with a decision last week for Jamaica to serve as the Sub-regional Operational Focal Point for responses to the Haitian humanitarian crisis.

January 17, 2010

jamaicaobserver

Bahamas Caribbean Blog International

Bahamas: Evacuated Bahamians tell of Haiti's horror

By KRYSTEL ROLLE ~ Guardian Staff Reporter ~ krystel@nasguard.com:



Amid the death and despair that clouds Haiti, comes a miraculous story of survival.

Two Bahamians narrowly escaped death on Tuesday after a powerful earthquake ripped off the walls of the hotel they were staying in and flattened buildings all around them.

As the death toll rose as more bodies were dug out of concrete graves, Civil Aviation Director Captain Patrick Rolle and Flight Inspector Hubert Adderley said they are lucky to be alive.

The raw anguish permeating throughout the impoverished nation is something they said they could not have concocted in their worst nightmares.

The men, who were evacuated from Haiti on Wednesday and taken to Jamaica before arriving in New Providence on a Sky Bahamas flight yesterday, told of horrific scenes they said would not be forgotten anytime soon.

Both Rolle and Adderley said they were just getting settled in their rooms in Hotel Carib in Port-au-Prince when the earth shook.

The two were in Haiti attending an International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Safety and Security Conference.

"I was just checked in, got into the room and was sending an e-mail to my wife letting her know that I had arrived safe. When I got up from the chair to go over to the bed to make a note of something, the room started vibrating," Rolle recalled.

He said the wall in his room then collapsed around him, part of which hit him in his head.

"The room itself basically caved in," he added.

Rolle said he tried to get out of the main door but could not as the door frame was warped.

As a result, Rolle said he left through a sliding door and jumped a wall onto the roof of a restaurant.

"I did it. It sounds simple, but I don't know how I did it," Rolle added.

Adderley said he made a similar escape.

"My first instinct was to get out of this place quick," he said.

And, according to Adderley, that's exactly what he did.

"The sliding door was open. So I just got out, jumped over the railing, fell on the ground and continued moving to an open area," he said.

"I've never been in an earthquake before. My immediate thought was my family at home. I didn't come over here to not go back."

Rolle and Adderley said as they were riding away from the collapsed hotel, they saw a frightening sight — dead bodies all around them.

The harrowing images that are shown of the ravaged Port-au-Prince only reveal the beginning of the total devastation and despair that the powerful earthquake wrought on the nation, the Bahamian survivors said.

"What they're showing you [on the international news] is the main street," Rolle said. "What they're not showing you are the side streets where everyone lived — where nobody lives now. All the residents moved and now sleep in the middle of the street. Everyone is literally living in the streets."

He said the residents used stones to block the road so they could make their beds in the streets on the side of their dead loved ones.

The magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit the coast of Haiti at approximately 4:43 p.m. Tuesday.

Rolle, who had a gash on his head, said thousands of people were injured during the quake but are unable to get medical help.

"So they're there and there is no medical aid; the hospital has collapsed," he said.

"The UN medical clinic is overwhelmed. Another hospital was declared unfit. So everyone who was in ICU had to be taken out. There were literally hundreds of persons there, arms missing, foot off, bones exposed," he said.

"The media [are] saving the public from some of the things that [are] actually happening. The worst part is seeing persons sitting near their dead relatives. There's no one collecting the dead bodies."

The American Red Cross estimates that the earthquake may have affected about three million people in and near Port-au-Prince.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti are feared dead.

Bodies are piled along the devastated streets of Port-au-Prince. However, no official count has been made as thousands of people are thought to be trapped beneath the rubble of collapsed buildings.

"It's something that I would not like to experience again, seeing the amount of dead persons," Rolle said.

He added that he's still not sure what he feels.

"I can tell you that things that I thought were important in life are no longer important. When you see people lose everything they've got you realize that there is nothing else there. The only thing you have, I guess for myself as a Christian, is a relationship that cannot be broken by disaster," he said.

"And you have a hope that you can't lose but when you see all of the people walking around with no hope and not knowing where they're going to get water or food, with no homes to go to, we realize that as a human the only thing you have are relationships."

Adderley said the images that he saw will stay with him for a long time.

"What was gut wrenching about all this, in the back of the hotel there's a hill and on the side of the hill are all these homes and when you look over in that area all you saw was a white cloud of dust and all you heard were moans and the cries of people and it was just gut wrenching," he said.

"It's something that I would never want to experience again. It's going to take a couple days to process out of this. I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone because there are persons we saw an hour or two before who we haven't seen since. It's a really, really horrific situation in Haiti right now."

January 15, 2010


thenassauguardian

Bahamas Blog International

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