Note that the number of Haitians in the US appears to be around 1 million, which would be 10% of the population of Haiti. Their remittances to Haiti are a meaningful part of the economy - something like 25%.
That was just a cover story for Port Royal’s destruction by a crew of undead pirates.
I just donated as much as I could to Direct Relief International (Haiti Earthquake 2010 | Direct Relief)
Yesterday, within hours of the quake, they had already sent two shipping containers of medical aid to 3 hospitals that they have partnered with in the past. Aid will be ongoing (and they get the highest ranking as a charity through Charity Navigator)
Please donate what you can.
Good choice. One of my best friends interned with them at their headquarters last year. They’re a great organization.
A Monkey With a Gun has been pitted.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=11989539#post11989539
Here’s the quote it’s likely referencing, this from NBC:
*Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told Reuters that thousands of buildings had collapsed in the capital, Port-au-Prince, and said he believed the casualties would be “in the range of thousands of dead.”
He added he could give no clear official estimate. Soon after, however, Bellerive told CNN that “I believe we are well over 100,000” dead, while Haitian Sen. Youri Latortue said it could be 500,000. Both admit they have no way of knowing. Other officials said it was too early to give a precise accounting of the toll. *
The earthquake apparently affected only the Port-au-Prince area and did not affect the DR at all.
You know, there’s an important moral to be learned from all of this:
Earthquakes suck.
I don’t know if Google Earth is accurate but there are dozens of plotted readings of the earthquake. there are 5.0 readings 30 miles away.
The Port-au-Prince metro area has about two million people, according to wikipedia. Most of the damage seems localized to that area, so 500,000 would mean that one out of four people in the effected area has been killed. That sounds implausibly high.
Not that this isn’t a terrible disaster - it is. But the dead probably number “only” in the thousands, at most.
Of course, more will die soon. Lack of sanitation/shelter/food/medical treatment, etc. Even with all the goodwill in the world, emergency aid just can’t fill in all the things that will be needed to keep people from dying.
I hope that the grants/loans that come in for reconstruction mandate earthquake-resistant construction.
Right. Much too early. At least a week of cleanup will need to occur before a realistic figure can be determined. I’m not saying that a smaller number makes anything better, but it is quite common to overestimate the number of dead in initial estimates after a disaster of this kind. For example, IIRC initial estimates after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers were in the 10-15K range, about four times the eventual toll.
No matter how one cuts it, however, there will be plenty of misery to go round for the survivors, for quite some time.
In Haiti, that would be a counsel of perfection. If you were living in a shack of boards held together by spit before the earthquake, you’re probably not going to be living in a reinforced-concrete apartment block any time in the next decade.
I hope this is right. But you’d have to call it remarkable if the number of dead proves to be the same order of magnitude as the number of collapsed buildings.
Good point. And at the end of the day, maybe earthquakes of this intensity are rare enough that more lives will be saved by getting people back in ramshackle housing as quickly as possible.
The last major earthquake to hit Haiti was in 1860. The last major earthquake in the Port-au-Prince area was in 1770.
Well, it looks like Pat Robertson has gone and stuck both feet in his mouth up to the waist by saying the Haitians made a pact with Satan (embedded video, ~6mins in) to get them out from under French rule and that’s why all this is happening to them.
Fucking tool.
This makes absolutely no sense. Haiti has been independent of French rule almost as long as the US has, well over 200 years. The population had a major surge from 250,000 in the 50s to over 9,000,000 today. Virtually nothing about the colossal problems with Haiti have any similarity or any connection to French colonial rule. The entire assertion is nonsense.
The Haitian fiasco of the last 50 years has been entirely managed and fostered by Haitian leadership.
Never knew the US was under French rule, Omniscient. 
All this tragedy, and the thing I keep hearing about the most on the radio today? The dog video.
Fixing a typo, that should have been 2,500,000 in 1950, not 250,000.
Robertson’s main sources for his 1991 book The New World Order were the anti-semitic conspiracy theorists Nesta Webster and Eustace Mullins. In fact, Robertson cribbed long passages from Webster directly, without attribution, substituting other words such as “Illuminati” for “Jews”; you can read the details in Up From Conservatism, by Michael Lind. That’s the kind of mind he has.