U.S. officials in
Haiti warned that the Haitian government would be unable to
handle a catastrophic earthquake five years before a devastating
tremor ended up destroying large swathes of the Haitian capital
and surrounding towns, killing tens of thousands and destroying
hundreds of buildings, according to a secret U.S. cable obtained
by the media organization WikiLeaks.
“The last thing
Haiti needs now is an earthquake,”
said a
May 25, 2005 cable, written two weeks after a 4.3
magnitude tremor shook the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, on
May 11. There were no reported injuries and only very minor
damage, according to the cable.
The earthquake warning was in a trove of 1,918
cables that WikiLeaks made available to Haïti Liberté.
“A more severe earthquake would be catastrophic,
as the government of
Haiti is unprepared to handle a natural disaster of any
magnitude,” added the
cable, warning that any large tremor would compound problems of
political instability, poverty and environmental degradation.
“On [sic] OFDA [Office of Foreign Disaster
Assistance] team will come to
Port-au-Prince in June [2005] to help
the embassy coordinate its disaster preparations, and to try to
jump-start [Government of Haiti] and donor coordination and
planning,” concluded the
cable.
Still, the January 12, 2010, earthquake appeared to catch
unprepared the Haitian government, international NGOs, and the
9,000-strong UN military force that had been occupying Haiti
since the 2004 overthrow of former president Jean-Bertrand
Aristide.
Relief and reconstruction efforts were – and continue to be –
slow and chaotic, marred by a lack of coordination and open
competition among various governments and international
agencies.
“I just don’t understand it,” exclaimed ABC
News Anchor Diane Sawyer six days after the earthquake,
questioning the sluggishness of U.S. relief efforts. “I do
not understand it: six days and they are only 90 minutes away
from Miami.”
“With every day that passes in the mud and rubble
of Haiti, the failures
of the relief effort are heartbreaking,”
added the New York Times in an editorial two months
later.
Still today, 16 months after the quake, only about 37% of $4.6
billion in support pledges have actually been disbursed, a
crucial issue given the dominant role that the international
community plays in Haiti. Some 65% of the Haitian government
budget, and all of the Haitian government’s capital spending,
comes from international sources.
A USAID-commissioned report dated May 13 and
entitled “Building Assessments and Rubble Removal in
Quake-Affected Neighborhoods in Haiti” estimates that
between 141,000 and 375,000 people remain without homes. The
study, conducted and written principally by statistician and
US-aid critic Timothy Schwartz, calculates that somewhere
between 46,000 to 85,000 people died in the quake. The
previously accepted death toll put forth by the Haitian
government was 312,000.
Haiti lies between two major fault lines that
traverse the country, one under the capital and one under the
second largest city, Cap Haïtien, in the north. Seismologists
consider both faults “quite dangerous,” the cable notes.
“The northern fault, in particular, has not
released significant energy in over 800 years,” the cable
warns. “According to experts, approximately 4 to 8 meters of
left lateral slippage has already accumulated and should it be
released, could register 8.0 or higher on the Richter scale,
with no forewarning.”
“The soil conditions in
Haiti are such that an earthquake anywhere in the country could
cause severe liquefaction, whereby soil is turned to a quicksand
type liquid, which is a considerable threat to infrastructure
such as buildings, dams, bridges and highways,”
the cable added. |
