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.