On This Day in 2010: Haiti's Devastating Earthquake
Haiti is seismically active and has a long history of destructive earthquakes, with the earliest major recorded earthquakes dating back to the 1700s. Major earthquakes still occur to present day, with one of the two recent major, devastating earthquakes occurring in January 2010.
On January 12, 2010, an earthquake hit at 4:53 PM, about 15 miles southwest of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. The initial shock registered a magnitude of 7.0 and was soon followed by two aftershocks of magnitudes 5.9 and 5.5. More aftershocks occurred in the following days, including another one of magnitude 5.9 that struck on January 20 at Petit Goâve, a town located about 35 miles west of Port-au-Prince. This earthquake struck in the most populated area of the country, which exacerbated the effects on the Haitian people, with as many as 3 million people impacted by the quake.
Geologists determined that the earthquake was generated by contractional deformation along the Léogâne fault, a small hidden thrust fault discovered underneath the city of Léogâne. The Léogâne fault, which cannot be observed at the surface, descends northward at an oblique angle away from the Enriquillo–Plantain Garden fault system. Many geologists assert that the earthquake stemmed from the slippage of rock upward across its plane of fracture.
The earthquake struck at a depth of 8.1 miles, which is relatively shallow, so this increased the amount of shaking at the Earth’s surface. The shocks affected Haiti and the Dominican Republic as well as in parts of nearby Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. The densely populated region around Port-au-Prince, situated on the Gulf of Gonâve, was among those most heavily affected. Farther south, the city of Jacmel also sustained significant damage, and to the west, the city of Léogâne, even closer to the epicentre than Port-au-Prince, was largely demolished.
Crumpled buildings defined the landscape of the disaster area, which was due to Haiti’s poor infrastructure and lack of building codes. Without adequate reinforcement, multi-story concrete buildings collapsed as well as thousands of homes, displacing up to 1.5 million people and even killing or trapping their occupants. In Port-au-Prince, the cathedral and the National Palace were severely damaged, as well as the United Nations headquarters, national penitentiary, and parliament building. The city was ill-equipped to deal with such a disaster due to the strained and insufficient infrastructure and the lingering effect from the two tropical storms and two hurricanes from August to September 2008.
Death toll estimates range from 100,000 to about 160,000 to Haitian government figures from 220,000 to 316,000. Around 300,000 were injured and the government of Haiti estimated that 250,000 residences and 30,000 commercial buildings had collapsed or were severely damaged. Total damage was estimated at $7.8 billion to 8.5 billion.
Sources: npr.org, britannica.com
Story Image: An aerial view of the UN headquarters in Haiti shows the devastation caused by an earthquake measuring 7 plus on the Richter scale that rocked Port au Prince Haiti just before 5 pm, January 12, 2010. UN Photo/Logan Abassi