Here at Pameno.com, we obviously have to pay attention to the news cycle. We write about disaster, so when disasters happen, we obviously watch and talk with each other about it. Click here to learn how to prepare for an earthquake.
As the staff’s earthquake expert, I needed to be on top of this Haiti quake, and the resulting chaos that occurred. For those of you who may have been on the moon, Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, was devastated by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake on Tuesday, and according to the Red Cross, was responsible for the deaths of some 50,000 people.
The Haiti quake had over 30 aftershocks, going as high as 5.9, and pretty much wiped out the entire infrastructure of the city, if not the whole country: no phones, no cell network, no Internet, no power, no water, no security, no government, roads reduced to rubble and only one working runway in the whole country. France, Spain, China, the United States and many others around the world responded quickly, with money and flights of first responders, but just landing at the Haiti airport is a logistical nightmare.
My editor wanted me to address the sorts of questions Americans might have, but I think any time a major disaster of any kind happens anywhere two questions always top the list:
“Was this preventable?”
and of course,
“Could this happen here?”
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My first response is to say, “What happened in Haiti was the result of poverty on a scale that makes Mexico blush. “ But I can see how that would sound like a cop-out.
So, I’ll tell you as I told my mother. Yes, a 7.0 quake is no stranger to California, and sure, one could happen in the middle of Los Angeles or San Francisco. It could very well be awful, but it would take a lot more than that for society to break down to the point where the streets are full of starving machete-wielding mobs, and aid workers are unable to even land their planes.
We might complain about them, and the tax dollars we give them, but thank God for American bureaucrats. FEMA, your state government, Congress, and all the guys who provide oversight over things like building construction and emergency services make mistakes, but they, like us at Pameno, are in the business of expecting the worst and urging the public to be ready. For all they do wrong and get criticized for, I can promise you that a 7.0 quake in the middle of LA would never result in the kind of nightmare the nightly news is broadcasting right now from Haiti.
Our building codes exist for a reason. While there’s no hard guarantee that every building in California built to code is protected from every possible act of God that comes its way, most of us in a 7.0 quake would still avoid the fate of being flattened into the concrete pancakes covering the rubble of Port-au-Prince.
We also have a far more organized and funded emergency response team, a partnership that extends from your local firehouse, all the way up to the National Guard, at the state level alone. The United States has seen its share of looters after hurricanes, and has seen it’s share of riots, but for the most part, we are pretty darn good at containing the worst of it.
Our own infrastructure, to be sure, leaves much to be desired in the way it is managed, but still…the margin of error for the world’s most affluent nation is orders of magnitude less than one of the world’s least affluent.
Haiti is no stranger to disasters. In 2008, Haiti was hit hard by FOUR hurricanes, all of them horrific, and never since that time was there any great adjustment to prepare for the next one. As one of the world’s poorest nations, they aren’t even able to enforce building codes for their own government buildings, much less provide adequate emergency service. Even with the help of the US military, the United Nations, and former president Bill Clinton as the UN’s special envoy, Port-au-Prince could never dream of the sort of emergency services and infrastructure that a Sacramento, Albany or Austin plans for and budgets for every day.
It’s one thing for people to die because the buildings they are in were shoddily built as a result of poverty, but it seems a whole different kind of thing to see them die of dehydration and starvation because rescue workers can’t reach them.
The safety evangelist in me though still wonders how people, even in the poorest corners of the planet wouldn’t have a small stockpile for a rainy day. For all the shortcoming of Haiti’s government and for all the poverty of it’s people, a three day supply of food and water is not an impossible thing to ask people to keep handy.
Then again, if you can afford the computer, electricity, and Internet connection to read this, right now, you are certainly more than capable as well, and you probably haven’t set aside three days of food and water either.
In closing, I think Haiti’s poverty made this awful scene we are witnessing unavoidable, and it’s not really anyone’s “fault.” Still, every one of us, no matter where we live (or even how poor we are) can take the steps needed to give ourselves a huge advantage when things go wrong. Right now people are killing each other for a drink of water in Haiti, that days before could have been poured from the tap into empty bottles and stored away in every home.
It’s a very powerful image and Mom, Dad, Grandma…if you are reading this, I just want to say that having a few days of water and canned vegetables and sardines does not make you a nerd or a cuckoo in a tinfoil hat.
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