Nearly two weeks later: The policy debate begins

Now that the Haitian government has decided that the earthquake has moved from the rescue to the debris clearance phase, news attention has turned away, to some extent, from the individual suffering of people in the disaster, and has moved more toward longer-term policy questions. A typically-snarky satirical piece in The Onion seems to poke fun at North Americans' attitudes toward--and knowledge of--Haiti, although it also, at the end, drives home the point that the United States hasn't really done as much as it could for Haiti; as I mentioned in an earlier post, the U.S. foreign aid budget for Haiti is rather small compared with the overall federal budget, and is not large compared to what we give to our largest recipients. 

Click to enlarge. Table from the US Federal budget via http://diplopundit.blogspot.com/2009/11/snapshot-top-10-recipients-of-us.html


Even if the United States increased its aid by a factor of five, Haiti would not be in the top ten list for FY 2010. I could very well be wrong on this point, and welcome corrections. But we cannot say that, in the past, the US has been a hugely generous provider of aid. Indeed, in coverage of a major donor conference in Montreal, the New York Times notes the size of the Haitian community in Montreal and the Canadian's claim that Canada, per capita, provides more aid to Haiti than any other donor.


Foreign Policy magazine maintains a useful web site, and there are two articles worthy of note. One is a simplistic treatment of where the next big earthquakes in the world may strike. The other, much more useful article, suggests that social media--Twitter, in particular--coveys little information of any particular news value--that the hashtag #Haiti yields numerous statements of sympathy and solidarity, but very little news. The article's author suggests that established news outlets are using Twitter as a complement to their news product, but not as a source of supplemental information. Indeed, how can it? Twitter is a burst of 140 characters at a time--not much depth there. Twitter may be useful for communicating with other survivors, and for sharing information, but I wonder what cell phone penetration is into the Haitian market given the relative poverty of the country. According to the CIA World Factbook, Haiti's "telecommunications infrastructure is among the least developed in Latin America and the Caribbean; domestic facilities barely adequate; international facilities slightly better; mobile-cellular telephone services are expanding rapidly due, in part, to the introduction of low-cost GSM phones in 2006" Still, no more than 30% of the population appears to have a cell phone, and the number may be less. While some rescues were initiated because of text messaging, it's unlikely that all but the more affluent will have  access to mobile phones. Interestingly, there are far more mobile subscribers than land-line subscribers in Haiti, as is typical of other developing countries where it is much easier to expand access through wireless than through landlines. Even the much-repeated story of a person surviving in the rubble of the Hotel Montana through the use of an iPhone app for first aid is about an American--not a Haitian--and is about a phone app, not the phone network.  Still, this Foreign Policy article concludes with a selection of solid sources of information in the Twittersphere, which may well be useful.


With this in mind, Wired magazine has jumped in with its interesting new Haiti Rewired blog. I fear that this will be the usual "gee whiz" that has made Wired the Popular Science of the information age (flying cars! Everything with an IP address!), but a cursory look at this blog suggests that, if nothing else, interesting ideas will be debated, such as this comment on "hackable" but safe housing. 

Some ideas on buildings and construction practices in Haiti

The damage done by the Haiti earthquake made it abundantly clear that Haitian buildings were not built to modern seismic standards--or, perhaps, even to 40 or 50 year old standards. The failure of buildings was likely a result of the nature of the construction itself--which I am trying to learn more about, although it looks like a lot of concrete in the bigger buildings--or a result of the nature of the ground on which the buildings were located. The structures that fell into ravines were probably on steep slopes that were prone to sliding. I am also trying to learn more about whether that sliding was exacerbated by the huge deforestation problem in Haiti, where landslides remain a constant threat during rain and hurricanes because there's little to prevent erosion and mudslides. 


With that in mind, some links 

• "Building Better Schools in Poor, Shaky Places" [New York Times]
• ""Destruction of schools in Haiti quake crushes hopes of a better future for many" -- [Washington Post]
• For latest news on earthquake research in Haiti, see www.eeri.org
• Haiti Building Standards Development Project [Organization of American States]
• "Poor building codes, perfect-storm earthquake led to massive destruction in Haiti, experts say [Los Angeles Times] -- Very interesting article comparing the magnitude of this earthquake to the 1989 Loma Prieta event, which had a much different outcome.
• International Code Council page on Haiti efforts.

And this New York Times article is prima facie evidence of what I had suspected--little steel reinforced concrete, poor mix, awful design and construction practices.


I look forward to hearing more from the engineering and geoscience communities on these issues. 

And another thing--Tax deductions of charitable contributions

According to the White House, the President has signed legislation that makes charitable contributions (cash only) to organizations gathering relief funds for Haiti deductible from 2009 income taxes. Donations made between January 11 and March 1, 2010 are eligible. I am not sure that this will make a big difference in the total amount of donations, but if it even has a marginal effect it may be worthwhile.

Will Haiti be the toughest recovery in recent history?

It may well be, according to this article in the New York Times. While I'd like to learn more, it's certainly a plausible hypothesis.

Roundup and update of latest news on Haiti

First, an observation. Since the Tuesday Massachussets Senate election, and President Obama's plans to regulate the banks were revealed, the Haiti earthquake has fallen quite a bit off the front page of the New York Times' website. I plan to do an empirical analysis of how quickly this event fell out of the public eye. There is a benefit on many on-air and cable TV networks tonight, but Friday not is not traditionally a big TV night, although it will be interesting to see whether it raises donations.

Meanwhile, some interesting news items from the last few days:

"Do the Reporters in Haiti Have Their Own Food and Shelter? Plus: Why don't earthquakes get names, like hurricanes do?" [Slate]

"How Do You Measure an Earthquake From 250 Years Ago?" [Slate]

"Airline stands firm on bag policy for Haiti rescue workers" [CNN]

""Why Did We Focus on Securing Haiti Rather Than Helping Haitians? Here are two possibilities, neither of them flattering" [One of the best articles of the week, Slate]

Update
I found, somewhere, mention of the Palace Hotel in Port-au-Prince. The folks running their website are blogging about what is happening there. It appears to be one of the few hotels still open, although it is full for the foreseeable future of journalists and other workers.

Following up on the news coverage on "looting".

Isn't it time to stop referring to earthquake victims in Haiti as looters? CNN offers this commentary that might be of interest.

A journalist talks about news coverage of the Haiti earthquake

Amanda Ripley, Time magazine reporter and article of a great book, The Unthinkable, provides this extremely useful analysis of the news coverage of "looting" that followed the Haiti earthquake. This piece offers perspective and balance that can help social scientists and journalists understand each other. What interests me is the extent to which other journalists fail to call on social science expertise when trying to understand the social effects and meanings of disaster. Journalists, I think, tend to go with government or other "authority" figures, many of which are often equally, if not more likely, to propagate rumors and myths.

Disaster Research Newsletter Leads with Haiti

The Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado has published its latest edition, with an important essay (the first item) on what happens after the cameras leave Haiti. As Kathleen Tierney asks:

What happens when the media leave and the drama of lives being saved transitions into the gritty business of providing for the daily survival needs of hundreds of thousands of victims? Aid workers and agencies converge to provide assistance to disaster-stricken communities, but what happens when they leave and move on to the next disaster? What will it take to meet the challenges of recovery in a devastated nation?

This is clearly worth reading and contemplating. Indeed, the results of the Mass. senate election now occupy space on the front pages of the major news sites, pushing Haiti out of the front pages. BBC World Service at midnight E.T. last night led with the Senate race; it had been leading with Haiti for several days straight. How long will Haiti remain on the news agenda, and on the public's mind? If history is any guide, not very long at all.

Important maps of conditions in Haiti

Dana Greene at NC Central U. shared this link with me--it shows maps of all manner of important information about the earthquake, including damage assessment and blockages of roads.

Yet more on media foolishness on class and disaster impact

Joseph Palermo, a professor of history at Sacramento State, provides this useful corrective to the "disaster knows no class distinction" coverage in the mainstream media. It's interesting that the "new media" seems more likely to find the nuances and the more interesting and important questions than is the "mainstream media." Perhaps it's because some bloggers, who are not journalists, are not conditioned by their training and socialization to use the same story frames, which, in describing horror, actually are intended to provide some reassurance as to the ultimate fairness of, say, disasters as some sort of social leveler. Funny, no one talks about how the Panic of '08 was some great social leveler.

Predisaster conditions in Haiti

Here's a good video from the New York Times describing the preexisting poor conditions in Haiti, including the incredible extent of deforestation which makes the country more vulnerable to flooding, erosion, and landslides--none of which is helpful to a country so prone to rain and hurricanes. The video also describes the poor state of roads, which are also damaged by floods. It's a bad cycle which makes response and recovery that much more challenging.

Looting, yet again.

I admit that I am obsessed with the "looting" story frame. In a later post, I will explain why. Meanwhile, those of you on Facebook, if you're so inclined, join the Facebook group "I Know the Difference between Salvaging and Looting," set up by friend and colleague Michael Owens at Emory (and a former student at SUNY Albany). Michael gets double bonus points today.

"Looting," again--a balanced appraisal this time

The Root--a blog associated with Slate.com--has a remarkably good story about the question of looting versus scavenging or whatever here.

Disaster Experts in the News

Tricia Wachtendorf from the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center was on the air on Radio Times out of WHYY in Philadelphia--listen to the segment here. Tricia is a well-known sociologist in our field. Her segment starts at about the -16:55 mark (that is, 16:55 left in the program). As usual, the interview is great.

Natural Disasters and Economic Development: Some Data

In doing some quick and dirty research on trends in disaster-"caused" deaths in the United States, I ran across this blog post. The big takeaway: the Per Capita GDP in the Dominican Republic is at least 4 times that of Haiti, and this blog suggests it could be over six times greater. As a rule of thumb, as overall societal wealth increases, vulnerability to injury and death from disasters decreases.

Finally

The Lede blog in the New York Times today finally acknowledged that all looting isn't looting. The entire blog is worth a look, but here's the relevant language:

Update | 12:34 p.m. As Haitians wait for aid to reach them, on what local bloggers are calling “Haiti Year Zero, Day 6,” some observers are asking if it is fair to call people who take goods from ruined shops “looters.”

This video posted online by The Associated Press on Monday shows Haitian police firing in the air to disperse young men carrying goods from destroyed buildings in Port-au-Prince:

Looking at video of a similar scene on Sunday, Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré, retired, who took charge of security in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina,told CNN: “These people are trying to survive, and you should not shoot someone over trying to get food - they are [doing] nothing but expressing a human need to get food.” He added, “The president of Haiti needs to declare right now, if we’re gonna make this a better place, that no one will be shot for trying to get food.”

Call for Disaster Bloggers (and not just on Haiti)

If you're a disaster researcher, relief worker, disaster survivor (of any disaster anywhere), journalist who has a new or interesting perspective, etc., and would like to contribute to this blog, please let me know at tom.birkland@gmail.com. The best blogs, after all, are not written by one person! If you'd like to write posts, I can certainly arrange to list you as an author. Thanks, all!

Some updates on search and rescue from Haiti

Some very interesting updates and information at http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/latest-updates-on-rescue-and-recovery-in-haiti-3/. This New York Times Blog is worth following.

Aid organizations and Haiti

VOAD (Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster) has links to aid groups at http://www.nvoad.org/.

A new word for looting?

A thread on my Facebook page expresses disdain for the media's continued use of the "looting" frame. As my wife said, "I heard about people "looting bags of rice" on NPR this morning.... As far as I am concerned those are probably first responders doing rescue work." Indeed, we know that the "victims" or "survivors" of disasters are the first first responders. But the thread became a discussion of what to call looting that isn't looting. How about eating? Gleaning? Salvaging? I proposed "scavenging," but several people have pointed out its negative connotations. A colleague points out what Robert Neuwirth wrote in today's New York Times: "Not all theft is criminal. Looting is wrong, but lifting necessities like water or electricity is not. " (Neuwirth also uses the term "scavenging," but in a different context.)


Perhaps we can distinguish between the "gleaning" of things that are immediately useful and needed--water, food, clothing, medical supplies--and the "looting" of things that aren't immediately useful, like televisions. I don't understand the problem with gleaning such things in a city where the shops are in no threat of opening any time soon. To the extent that business owners lose money from looting, perhaps we can consider the existing stocks of necessities as "prepositioned aid," and then compensate the owners later. In any case, gleaning or "looting"  activity is usually opportunistic, and is no reason to condemn any group of people to claims of lawlessness or malevolence. 

How much does the U.S. Government spend on aid to Haiti?

One noted humanitarian and broadcaster suggested that Americans already provide enough aid to Haiti "through the income tax." How much aid does the United States provide? This state department page on Haiti says that

The U.S. has been Haiti's largest donor since 1973. Between FY 1995 and FY 2003, the U.S. contributed more than $850 million in assistance to Haiti. Since 2004, the U.S. has provided over $600 million for improving governance, security, the rule of law, economic recovery, and critical human needs. The President's budget request for FY 2007 was $198 million. U.S. Government funds have been used to support programs that have addressed a variety of problems.

By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, based on these data and some generous assumptions, the United States spent, between FY 1995 and FY 2010 (pre-disaster) about $2.1 billion on aid to Haiti, by the State Department's reckoning. I calculate that about 62 ten-thousands of one percent of the U.S. Federal budget (0.0062%) was spent on aid to Haiti. A well-off taxpayer who pays $15,000 in federal income taxes will then contribute about 92 cents per year to Haiti through foreign aid, assuming that income taxes were the government's only source of revenue. At about $95 million a year, I can imagine that private charity this year will exceed the typical annual U.S. aid to Haiti.  

Americans routinely overestimate the amount and proportion of American foreign aid spending, although in the early 2000s it appears Americans' support of foreign aid grew, so our broadcaster's attitudes on the issue place him squarely in the fringe of mainstream thought--and that's not news.

Tonight's last post: Looting, and machetes

An article in the New York Times ledes thus: "Along the capital’s main commercial strip Saturday afternoon, dozens of armed men — some wielding machetes, others with sharpened pieces of wood — dodged from storefront to storefront, battering down doors and hauling away whatever they could carry: shoes, luggage, rolls of carpet."


Any anthropologists or sociologists out there to help me out? This invocation of "machetes" seems to be a not-so-subtle symbol of scary, lawless people in developing countries. And the looting frame, while popular, is often false. I imagine that Haiti may become one of those places where we see dissensus, rather than consensus, behavior given that civil authority, weak before the disaster, has broken down given the destruction suffered by government institutions and major NGOs themselves. But Diane Rehm invoked the "machete" image last Friday (January 15) on her radio show on NPR/WAMU, and this frame bothers me. 


It's worth noting that her show will feature the Haiti disaster on Tuesday, January 19, at 10:00 am Eastern; if your NPR affiliate doesn't cover it I believe WAMU provides streaming audio. I note with some dismay that, as is her wont, her panelists are an academic who studies Haiti (good) and the "Latin America Correspondent for the Miami Herald." It's truly disappointing that, given the often-poor coverage of this disaster, that even a high-quality news-talk show on NPR cannot be bothered to seek out a disaster expert.

Kathleen Tierney compares the Haiti Earthquake with Katrina

Kathleen Tierney, a sociologist and internationally known expert on disasters, provided a commentary on CNN that describes how the Haiti earthquake was proportionately more catastrophic for Haiti than was Hurricane Hugo for the United States as a whole.

Things I want to post here, and things I don't know

If the focus is on Haiti for now, there's a lot of information that could be brought together here and maintained for the research community and for interested citizens. With this in mind, I invite folks to comment on posts here or to send ideas to me at tom.birkland@gmail.com. Some of the things I'd like to see are:

• Reports from charities/NGOs about their activities in Haiti, and information about the most effective ways to give resources to aid agencies.
• Background information on Haiti, including social, cultural, economic, and other data. 
• Background information on the nature of health care and public health in Haiti, both before and after the earthquake
• Background on the organization of Haitian politics in the years before the earthquake, and how that system performed in past disasters (hurricanes) and how it is recovering--if at all--from this disaster
• Information on Haiti's infrastructure--ports, water, sewer, power, telecom, hospitals, transport, airports, and so on. 
• Scholarly literature on disasters broadly that would be relevant to this disaster
• Scholarly literature and good popular literature that would help explain disasters in general, and this disaster in particular, to a lay audience, including decison makers and journalists that need background on disasters to do their jobs effectively.

These ideas are in no particular order--they're just things I'd like to know more about, and I suspect others will too. I will be collecting this sort of material in the months to come, and will share it here, or, if the volume is great enough, on a linked website.

Opening Note

While I have been studying natural disasters for nearly twenty years, the Haiti earthquake has troubled me in ways I've never experienced about other disasters. Perhaps it's the apparent novelty of the event--I knew that the Caribbean basin was prone to hurricanes, certainly, and to earthquakes, but I never really considered the earthquake hazard very closely. At a 2006 meeting of emergency planners in Jacksonville, Florida, I learned that the region had an earthquake hazard that also meant a tsunami hazard. But I had never really considered the probability until the Haiti earthquake. The USGS's map of the region did suggest an earthquake hazard, but the peak ground acceleration expected--from 0.6 to 1.6 m/s^2 is rather less than much of California's, Washington, or Alaska's hazard, and certainly seemed less important than the hazard in Japan, Central America, and the like. Clearly, there was a risk here, and we know it.

The response to the earthquake is, in many ways, typical of response in any disaster, although there are unique features of Haiti that will play a role, I am sure. What I am not sure about is Haiti itself--I know little about it besides its recent political experience. I do know, from the usual source, that its per capita income is very low, it's the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, and that its infrastructure, even before the earthquake, was not the best. This makes for a highly vulnerable population, and a challenging relief environment. The news coverage of the bottleneck for supplies at the airport in Port-au-Prince is not entirely surprising. I suspect that the hospital and public health systems were poor at the outset, and are worse now. Clean water was unavailable to most Haitians pre-quake, and is badly compromised now. This we know, or can glean from reports, and is unsurprising.

The U.S. news coverage of this event--about which I will have more to say later--has demonstrated, yet again, that news reporters usually do not make the effort to learn about disasters in general, and what to expect from any disaster in particular. While Haiti may descent into "chaos" and "lawlessness," as relief needs become more profound, the extent to which outlets like CNN, the New York Times, and the BBC seek "panic" and "looting"--the pre-existing templates that journalists routinely use in disasters--is appalling in the face of evidence, reported by these same organizations--that pro-social behavior* is evident and that ordinary people, to the extent possible, are helping people rescue some trapped people and, unfortunately, to retrieve bodies. Claims, like a recent one in the New York Times, that the earthquake made no distinction between the rich and poor reflect simple illogic and lazy reporting, as well as decades of social science research that demonstrates that poorer people are more vulnerable to disasters, and take much longer to recover, than do wealthier people. This was as true in New Orleans in 2005 as it is in Haiti today, although we know that Haitians are much poorer.

Perhaps one of the main reasons for so much media attention is the huge extent of damage; it is more profound than we'd expect to see in California, a state with a stringent state hazard mitigation policies for earthquakes. The extent of the damage was due, I believe, to the lack of building codes in Haiti (although such codes are useless without enforcement) and, perhaps, to a lack of appreciation for a hazard that has an apparently shorter return interval than damaging earthquakes in California. A future discussion might consider the earthquake risk for the central United States from the New Madrid region, where a temblor could do significant damage. 

These are some initial thoughts I had in the first few days. I am sure that I will post a great deal more, not as a news log, but as the beginnings of a repository of disaster information. I look forward to comments and suggestions.


* Disclaimer: I'm practicing sociology without a license here, and hope that, if this blog gains traction, that sociologists can weigh in on this sort of topic.