7.0 Earthquake Tuesday in Haiti

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[pacos_gal]

The structures that stood up the best or at least caused the least amount of damage and death were the wood structures.  Unfortunately Haiti has very little left in the way of forest land after major logging in years gone by.  The concrete structures which is what a majority of buildings are built out of, are almost completely destroyed in some areas, severely damaged in others and killed anyone inside or near when they collapsed. 
Concrete is Not a good option in Haiti obviously as far as survivability in the event of the next earthquake, yet they have little else to use to build with. 
I hope the construction contract winners remember the lessons from this earthquake when they start rebuilding yet the fear is that they will not.

[futurexpat?]

Also, I think when they build there, they tend to build more in mind of hurricanes than earthquakes.

[pacos_gal]

The is the story of the last flight from Montreal on the day of the earthquake the passengers on board that flight.

Canadian survivors relive their fateful flight to Haiti

The Air Canada flight on a rendezvous with fate was routine and uneventful. Passengers watched romantic comedies, munched on stale sandwiches and fretted about legroom. A little more than two hours after landing, what had passed for the normal would seem inane. Cataclysms have a way of doing that.

Flight 950 left Montreal's Pierre Elliot Trudeau International Airport at 9:50 in the morning on Jan.12, the last direct commercial flight from Canada to Haiti that day. On board were 195 passengers.

[Sirenoftitan]

Curiouser and curiouser.....

<snip>
There have been other peculiar aspects of Silsby's leadership in the middle of a disaster zone. In the hectic days after the quake, when she was assembling the group to go out to Haiti, she somehow managed to track down a couple from Kentucky, Richard and Malinda Pickett, to offer them help in extracting three children they were already in the process of adopting. She phoned three times, and on each occasion was told by the Picketts that on no condition should she try to move the children. Remarkably, she didn't stop then. Once in Haiti, Silsby turned up at the orphanage where the children were and asked to collect them. Richard Pickett told Associated Press that she had claimed to be his wife's friend. The three children had by then already been moved, so Silsby asked the orphanage managers if they had any other children she could have.

Haiti earthquake: In God's name by Ed Pilkington and Inigo Gilmore, The Guardian

[Writing from Alaska]

Curiouser and curiouser.....

Haiti earthquake: In God's name by Ed Pilkington and Inigo Gilmore, The Guardian


I agree, and found this part of the article especially interesting as it speaks to some historical shifts that have taken place with the Southern Baptists bringing us to where they are today politically.

.......Over the past 20 years there has been a dramatic shift away from "career missionaries" who spend years immersed in the culture and language of the people they seek to turn to God, in favour of "missionary tourists" who dip in and out of communities for mere days or weeks and have much less cultural sensitivity.

According to David Key, director of Baptist Studies at Emory University's Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, that sea change has come at a time when the convention has been increasingly focused on domestic social and political issues as part of the Christian right, which has led it to sound a strong note of American superiority. "Anyone under 40 years of age will have spent their entire life in the America First model of evangelism," says Key.

Thanks for posting this link - this is the best article I have seen so far on this situation.

[daMamma]

It seems now that at the center of the Americans being detained is a suspected child trafficker for the sex trade.  This case just keeps getting twistier, stranger, and just plain covered in total weirdness.  

from the Seattle Times

Detained Americans' adviser suspected of trafficking

The police in El Salvador have begun an investigation into whether a man suspected of leading a trafficking ring involving Central American and Caribbean women and girls has been providing legal advice to the Americans charged with trying to take 33 children out of Haiti without permission.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The police in El Salvador have begun an investigation into whether a man suspected of leading a trafficking ring involving Central American and Caribbean women and girls has been providing legal advice to the Americans charged with trying to take 33 children out of Haiti without permission.

When the judge presiding over the Haitian case learned Thursday of the investigation in El Salvador, he said he would begin his own inquiry into the adviser, Jorge Puello, who was in the judge's chambers days before.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2011050829_haiti12.html?syndication=rss


<forgot link>

[Lani]

Eight of the 10 Americans have been released without posting bond and are now in Florida.  Two remain in custody.  Apparently, they were in Haiti in December before the earthquake, and that's raised some suspicions.  (In addition to their relationship with Puello.)
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/02/18/haiti.americans.return/

[daMamma]

One wonders who was using who in that relationship. 

[Forty Watt]

It just is endless for these poor folks.

At least eight people have been killed in floods triggered by heavy rain in Haiti, officials have said.

The deaths occurred in or near the southeastern port city of Les Cayes which was swamped by more than 1.5m (5ft) of water.

Officials said buildings affected included a hospital and a prison where more than 400 inmates were evacuated.

About a million Haitians are still homeless following January's earthquake which killed up to 230,000 people.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8541361.stm

[daMamma]

This is is turning out to be a very bad year for this tiny nation.  I can only hope that when Hurricane season rolls around that they are mercifully missed by every one. 

[daMamma]

May not be the best solution, but its not a bad one either.  I like this idea a lot.  I love the drawings of the "house" plans. 

Haiti turns to housing the homeless
What's the best way to empty a 6,000-person tent city?

That's the vexing question that has plagued government officials and aid agencies for weeks as they grapple to find a long-term housing solution for the thousands of newly homeless people in Jacmel. It's a challenge that's taking on an increasing sense of urgency as the Caribbean hurricane season – which could quickly turn a tent city into a scene of muddy devastation – approaches.

While many of those who lost their homes in Haiti's earthquake have been sleeping in the streets in flimsy camping tents, thousands more have settled their families into two massive camps. With almost nightly rain, conditions in the camps are increasingly grim. At Pinchinat, the larger 6,000-person camp located on a school football pitch, residents eat only once a day, crime is rampant and a prostitution ring has recently sprung up.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/haiti/project-jacmel/haiti-turns-to-housing-the-homeless/article1492056/

[futurexpat?]

This sounds cool.

Over the past week, residents armed with tools purchased in Jacmel by the Swiss NGO Medair have been clearing debris from residential lots. On nine of the cleared lots, Medair has erected metal-framed tent-like structures that, when bolted into the ground, are designed to evolve from temporary shelters into permanent homes as families accumulate the means – wood, corrugated tin and plastic sheets – to build onto them.

“It looks like a tent and feels like a tent, but it's your building block to a permanent house,” said Roger Sandberg, Medair's country director in Haiti.

(From above source)

I sure hope those people can catch a break.

I read there was just an earthquake in Turkey. Bad times out there for a lot of people.

[daMamma]

I read there was just an earthquake in Turkey. Bad times out there for a lot of people.

From what I understand that was a 6.0 and they've had about 40 aftershocks so far.  51 dead.

Some of those more rural areas they don't really have much more than dirt to begin with.  (judging solely from the hundreds of photographs I've seen over the years)

[Forty Watt]

A US missionary has been convicted of trying to illegally take 33 children out of Haiti in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in January.

The judge sentenced Laura Silsby, 40, to the time she had already spent in jail on remand, and said she was free to leave the country.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8688496.stm

[Forty Watt]

Six months on, a mere 28,000 of the 1.5 million displaced Haitians have new homes.

Hundreds of displaced families live perilously in a single file of flimsy shanties planted along the median strip of a heavily congested coastal road here called the Route des Rails.

Vehicles rumble by day and night, blaring horns, kicking up dust and belching exhaust. Residents try to protect themselves by positioning tires as bumpers in front of their shacks but cars still hit, injure and sometimes kill them. Rarely does anybody stop to offer help, and Judith Guillaume, 23, often wonders why.

“Don’t they have a heart, or a suggestion?” asked Ms. Guillaume, who covers her children’s noses with her floral skirt when the diesel fumes get especially strong.

[Sirenoftitan]

<snip>
While some aspects of normal life have returned, rubble appears to have been untouched in large areas of the most badly affected neighbourhoods, survivors have been hit by escalating rent and food prices and, most worrying, those made homeless are steadily trickling back from temporary shanties in Port-au-Prince to live among the rat-infested ruins in areas like Fort National – encouraged to move, they say, by Haiti's government.

The dire state of affairs was underlined by a second report last week from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. "The current situation," it reported, "is not sustainable. The Red Cross and other agencies providing water and sanitation services are currently supplying services on behalf of the Haitian authorities and are stretched beyond their collective capacity and mandate. The current approach is of buying time while longer-term decisions are made. This situation cannot continue for ever."

Six months on, Haiti earthquake victims wait for billions in aid by Peter Beaumont, The Observer

<snip>
There is evidence from many sources – governments, aid agencies and ordinary Haitians – that reconstruction has frozen even before it has begun. Billions of dollars promised by the international community have yet to arrive; the whole effort is caught in leadership vacuum.

An interim reconstruction commission headed by Bill Clinton and Haiti's President Jean-Max Bellerive only met for the first time last month, a disgraceful delay. Mr Clinton has had a higher profile supporting the US team at the World Cup than he has in Haiti.

Observer Editorial: We have abandoned the Haitians

[Lani]

More about the failure of funds to reach Haiti in this article: Where's Haiti's Bailout? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/isabel-macdonald/wheres-haitis-bailout_b_643102.html

And here's an example of how the IMF and the earthquake disaster have helped a large, non-Haitian corporation:

Ratio of Haitian-produced rice to U.S.-imported rice consumed in Haiti in 1985: 22:1

Ratio of Haitian to US-produced rice consumed in Haiti in 2000, 5 years after an IMF structural adjustment program went into effect reducing rice import tariffs: 1:2

Value of USAID's current contract with a subsidiary of the parent company of American Rice Inc., the corporation that is considered to have most benefited from the demise of Haitian rice production: $126,000,000

[Sirenoftitan]

This year's devastating earthquake in Haiti was caused by a previously unknown fault, according to scientists.  This discovery, the researchers say, could be the first sign of a larger system of seismic faults in the area.

The Enriquillo fault, which runs through Port au Prince, was originally blamed. But new evidence has shown that it was not linked to the event.

Eric Calais from Purdue University in Indiana, presented the findings at an scientific meeting in Brazil.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10944024

[Forty Watt]

Encouraging news

The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission was set up after the Jan. 12 earthquake as a joint Haitian-international effort to effectively channel billions of dollars of donated reconstruction aid.

Like everything else about the recovery effort, the commission, led by Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive and former President Bill Clinton, has been too slow off the mark. But we were encouraged by its second meeting in Port-au-Prince this month, where it announced dozens of new projects with clear benchmarks and the commitment of more than $1 billion to complete them...

The goals outlined at the meeting include clearing a million cubic meters of rubble in Port-au-Prince and building enough short-term hurricane shelters for 400,000 to 500,000 people — both by November. The longer-term plans include a two-year, $4.3 billion reinvention of Haiti’s public school system, a $200 million program for agricultural development, and a $15 million, 320-bed teaching hospital in Mirebalais, in central Haiti.

And more

[Lani]

Yes, it is hurricane season, which is scary.  Makes the nightmare even worse.  The land is stripped of vegetation.

My child is close to a Haitian worker in an orphanage.  She is on leave at the moment, visiting near us.  The situation is still very dire.  This young woman has become accustomed to babies dying in her lap.  There are attempts to rebuild the shelter for orphans, but the mob rules, looking for food and water.