Haiti is a big country with large areas populated by subsistence farmers. What’s going on over there? The news don’t even mention the rest of the country. Are there troops/police/food/help they can send to Port au Prince? Can the refugees head over there to friends or family?
No matter how desperately poor the country may be, there must be parts faring better than the capital at this moment. Is that really an untapped resources or just an not covered news item?
Big Country? I don’t have an answer for you, but I don’t know that ‘Big Country’ is an accurate description of Haiti.
The Earthquake was about 100 miles from Port au Prince right? Where was the epicenter?
http://fs.huntingdon.edu/jlewis/syl/ircomp/Maps/HaitiReliefMap.gif
Things are probably better outside of the city simply because there would be fewer poorly constructed buildings to collapse on a person. You don’t hear anything about the Dominican Republic which takes up about 2/3rds of the island.
I live in a much smaller island and when we have had disasters (hurricanes, floods, etc) people move out of the affected areas with their relatives in less affected areas and work crews from less affected areas move in to the affected areas. This in an area probably less than a tenth of Haiti. It takes a while but most refugee camps are empty in 3-5 days after the disaster even if the damage takes forever to be fixed.
What little I have heard about DR in the local TVs and from friends is that it was a scare but no real damage. Hence the lack of interest from the world news.
I understand that the epicenterwas less than 10 miles from the capital, btw.
Anyways, while there might not be any other large cities besides the capital, there is still a lot of populated land with what the USGS estimates as light to no damage.
The epicenter was virtually underneath Port-au-prince - 15 kilometers, or 6 miles, from the city center.
Check it out:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/shakemap/global/shake/2010rja6/
Compare locations of quake intensity, with population:
Well based on Hello Again’s map it looks like the northern part of the country was pretty much unaffected.
Yes… but the areas where destructiveness was 9 or 10 on the 10 point scale (destruction: very heavy) includes 2.5 million people, or 27% of the population.
Also, it would seem like that even if you were not near the earthquake at the time, a typical Haitian probably knows somebody who is. I’d imagine almost the entire country is stressed wondering about the fate of their friends/family - or even about an uncertain future with so much national infrastructure wiped out.
Here’s a message from another thread on this same board in which someone in another part of Haiti says he felt almost nothing:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=12000337#post12000337
The latest BBC reports mention that up to 90% of buildings have been damaged in the town of Leogane, 18 miles west of Port-au-Prince, and that there has been an influx of people from the south into Haiti’s northern cities and into the Dominican Republic.
But I agree, the reporting has been surprisingly poor - usually with these types of natural disasters, the media have all sorts of maps reflecting the situation and multimedia clips of where and how the earthquake struck. I suppose partly it’s because of the problems of getting reporters over there and getting information, but with some reports there wasn’t even a map of Haiti or Port-au-Prince. I’ve been surprised by it.
Well Haiti’s population is approx 10 million and approx 1.75 million people live in the Port-au-Prince metro area. So that is about 17.5% of the nation’s population.
However Port-au-Prince is the main center of the nation so a lot of the infrastructure has been ruined too. This will result in inconvenience to the rest of the nation, though not on disaster levels seen in the capital
Looks at the second USGS map in my link. that is where I got 2.5 million – PauP proper is not the only location at 9 or 10 destruction.
It’s been stated Haiti is about as big as Maryland. Is that considered ‘big’?
Roughly, yes (Massachusetts is closest). It is big when you live in a neighboring island the size of Connecticut. The unaffected area is still bigger than Puerto Rico and as I said, when we have disasters here, the people is usually out of the disaster areas in less than a week and moved into unaffected areas while those have sent their help to the disaster.
However even accounting for that (Haiti’s total area is about 3X Puerto Rico’s) there is another critical factor to consider: ALL of PR has a transport, communications and industrial/commercial infrastructure in place that’s far superior to Haiti’s. There are multiple paved roads into every town, and with more than 1 car per every 2 people there’s enough vehicles even if half are immobilized; decent regional hospitals; even up in the hills store shelves are well stocked with basic necessities for at least the first few days, and so are most homes’ pantries; in all but the smalles towns, fleets of school buses and water tanker trucks and earth-moving equipment and trained Municipal Emergency Management Agencies. Also even though we also are demographically top heavy around our capital, we’re not as exclusively concentrated around SJ as they are around Port-au-Prince for major key functions – outside San Juan at opposite corners of the island we have two heavy-capable airports and another one that can handle 727-class planes, and half a dozen operational ports including deepwater-capable and fuel-offload facilities,and major powerplants and transmission lines; etc.
Even then, it has been 91 years since the last catastrophic earthquake in PR; we (and the Dominican Republic, and Cuba) are accustomed to dealing with natural disaster in the form of hurricanes, which provide us the basic meteorological courtesy of at least a day’s warning to run for high ground or hunker down. We have NO modern-era experience with the kind of calamity that instantly decapitates the mechanisms of state and commerce, destroys virtually all infrastructure including the shelters and emergency services, and kills thousands of people essentially where they stood minding their own business, for an entire metropolitan area.
There, but for the grace of God and History…
It’s sad, but what the rest of Haiti can afford to offer Port-au-Prince is almost nothing compared with the scale of the disaster; for the people in Port-au-Prince, fleeing to the countryside would be extremely difficult and a leap into uncertainty – at least they know that aid, when it does arrive, will head for the city.
I doubt very few countrys have that capability and thats do to decentralization. PaP took the equivalent of a five megaton airburst.
Declan
The news said a lot of the people were migrating out of the city. People will naturally migrate toward friends and family outside of the quake zone. Probably the only think keeping them there is a link to someone who is buried in the rubble.
I was thinking this morning where are these people going to the BATHROOM. I see events around our town and notice they have about 50 outhouses for about 1000 people what are the people of Haiti doing? It’s such a terrible tragedy and our hearts go out to the people but what a simple thing. Will that in itself cause disease? I know nobody wants to think about that but it is a natural thing, and where are the Haitian Military and Police. I am just assuming they are either dead or not showing up because they are looking for Family and friends. I am very impressed how the world has come forward it is very refreshing and thanks America for all you have done in such a terrible situation. I shall pray for all again tonight. This is a real life “SURVIVOR” series which will go on for more than 30 days.
When you gotta poop you gotta poop - people trapped in the rubble are going to the bathroom there, they have no choice. People out on the street with no home…? Behind bushes, in gutters… there might be a few buckets but they’ll fill up fast. If someone has shovels pits are possible, but really, people just don’t have a choice sometimes…
Read the news carefully. There is mention of “human waste”. Setting up some sort of latrine is just as important in these situations as food, water, shelter, and medicine. Yes, it most certainly is a public health hazard, but as I said, there may be many people for whom there is no choice.
As for the country outside Port-au-Prince - the BBC now has some reporting. Areas around the epicenter were just as devastated as the capital, if not more so, with 90% or more of building destroyed, thousands dead, thousands injured, and even less aid. The capital was the first place the reporters reached, and two million people in a shattered city captured their attention. Outside the city, though, things are equally desparate in many places although the further you go from the capital the less dire the situation. As mentioned, in some places the quake had little effect, such as the far north of the island.
While Haiti had been in the process of building roads and improving the infrastructure, overland transportation was always quite difficult. The poor roads just beat the crap out of vehicles. It’s no wonder that reporters haven’t ventured far from PaP.
There are already fuel shortages outside of PaP. The supply infrastructure for food and fuel that relied heavily on the PaP port has disappeared. The airport can’t take on any more traffic. It looks like it is going to be up to the US Military to establish an emergency supply chain. God bless them!
The emergency condition that the country finds itself in is far from over.
