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.

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.

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.

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.