The January 12, 2010 Haiti Earthquake will go down in history as one of the world’s most devastating. It is a grim fact that the ultimate death toll in tragedies such as these typically reach ten times or more the first estimates that break on the news wires. Early estimates of "thousands of dead" are likely to turn into tens of thousands, or even a hundred thousand or more, once the final tallies are in.
The tragedy in Haiti, unfortunately, is just one in a long string of seismic catastrophes that occur on a regular basis worldwide. Bandeh Aceh Indonesia, Izmit Turkey, Sichuan China, Spitak Armenia, Mexico City. The list goes on. Urban centers in poor countries that are nearly destroyed by earthquake forces. The images are much the same: heaps of concrete and concrete block, buildings twisted and almost unrecognizable. Buildings with entire floors missing, or literally fallen over like they were tipped by a titan’s finger. Look closer and with an engineer’s eye you’ll see the concrete, brown in color, looking more like sand or loose rocks, lacking the pale grey cement that should bind the material together in large chunks. You will see voids in the concrete blocks, where they are left hollow and ungrouted. You won’t see spaghetti like tendrils of steel reinforcing steel spraying from the concrete columns and beams and walls. Steel that might have helped to hold the brittle material together long enough to ride out the shaking without collapse.
A common and fatal thread runs through all these disasters with respect to the performance of large urban structures. They lack good engineering design and, more importantly, have the poorest of construction quality control. Old buildings are built before modern codes, and unlike in more prosperous countries, the buildings are stretched far beyond their useful lifetimes, like an old car patched together to run just another few years. Or, in a commendable, yet unacceptably aborted attempt to provide some measure of safety, the buildings may actually be designedto modern, US-like building codes, but with the reality known by all, that the contractors will cut corners and simply cut out vital components of the structure to save money, while the inspectors will just look the other way.
The tragedy in Haiti is, sadly, wholly unsurprising. There is not a structural engineer or seismologist who would be shocked at the extent of damage and the magnitude of the loss, nor deny the certainty that cities built in earthquake zones will eventually have to pay a dear price. It is probably not surprising to even the average person that catastrophes like this are bound to happen.
The media will blanket the airwaves with nonstop coverage of the earthquake for days to come. We will learn over the next weeks how many tens of thousands of people have been killed by it, how many buildings have collapsed, the economic cost. If you were grateful to finally have seen the end of top ten lists for the year, you will be subjected to a gruesome set of new lists showing where this earthquake ranks among the other great disasters in the world. None of this coverage is necessarily a bad thing. Aid will flow like water to Haiti, as it always has from a compassionate world in past catastrophes, even though for Haiti, already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, there is a real likelihood that the nation simply will never recover. But these disasters tend to hide an even more brutal and tragic fact that for the most part goes unreported and implicitly unnoticed by the "modern" world at large. In truth, earthquakes are often not the greatest of problems faced by the poorest of nations. Take simply one statistic, that over 25,000 children die each year because of poverty "And they die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world." This is just one figure, and even if the ultimate death toll in Haiti reaches 250,000, it will be less than the number of children dying from poor nutrition, nonexistent health care, work related accidents, and other devastations heaped upon them in less than two weeks, every two weeks, every year.
We – as a species? – are able to "emotionally manage" massive suffering and tragedy, if it is fed to us in a trickle. We know that there is poverty in the world, but our souls seem able to "live with it" if it comes to us at a low level of constant pain, like that damn arthritis in your wrist that’s annoying and won’t seem to go away. And because it is something we can ignore, the media does the calculus and decides it need not devote fancy graphics and on-the-scene reports and commercial-free specials to remind us of it. But we are not good at managing the big, concentrated events, where masses of people are killed. It is emotional overload and so we are prompted to do something, to give, to care. And the media, of course obliges our need.
A second-order tragedy will befall the poorest of the poor in Haiti. They, ironically, have perhaps the greatest chance of actually surviving the earthquake. Living in small mud and tin roof shanties, working outside much of the day, they are less likely to be trapped in the multi-story death traps that are the center of the "urbanized" city. They will emerge from the dust of the temblor to help save others only to go back home that night to what will undoubtedly become an even more precarious life, lacking even more than at present, access to the barest of government services and commerce from which they are able to maintain subsistence. The true death toll from the earthquake will take years to tally, because of the slow trickle of dying that will seep out from the ruins into the lives of the already barely living. I should not dare to say for others, but as for me, I would prefer the quick death of a hundred tons of concrete over the slow death of sickness and hunger and grinding poverty. I would that the Haiti earthquake would occur every month in this world in exchange for the elimination of poverty. Except, I suppose, that we would soon become inured to that as well.
No one should ignore this catastrophe. It is a time to be moved, to help, to turn those huge numbers, rounded off with so many faceless zeros, into real lives that can be saved. Beyond the normal channels of aid, consider, if you would, the following organization for your much needed support. Buildchange.org is an award winning nonprofit that builds earthquake resistant homes in the poorest areas of the world. The director is a woman with whom I’ve worked and who has a great heart.
But when the dust of this earthquake has settled, and the cameras move on, remember that these earthquakes are occurring, in smaller ways, every hour, every day, everywhere.