The earthquake in Chile was far stronger than the one that struck Haiti last month — yet the death toll in this Caribbean country is magnitudes higher.
The reasons are simple.
Chile is wealthier and infinitely better prepared, with strict building codes, robust emergency response and a long history of handling seismic catastrophes. No living Haitian had experienced a quake at home when the Jan. 12 disaster crumbled their poorly constructed buildings.
And Chile was relatively lucky this time.
Saturday’s quake was centered offshore an estimated 34km underground in a relatively unpopulated area while Haiti’s tectonic mayhem struck closer to the surface — about 13km — and right on the edge of Port-au-Prince, factors that increased its destructiveness.
“Earthquakes don’t kill — they don’t create damage — if there’s nothing to damage,” said Eric Calais, a Purdue University geophysicist studying the Haiti quake.
The US Geological Survey (USGS) said eight Haitian cities and towns — including this capital of 3 million — suffered “violent” to “extreme” shaking in last month’s 7-magnitude quake, which the Haitian government estimates killed some 220,000 people. Chile’s death toll was in the hundreds.
By contrast, no Chilean urban area suffered more than “severe” shaking — the third most serious level — on Saturday in its 8.8-magnitude disaster, by USGS measure.
In terms of energy released at the epicenter, the Chilean quake was 501 times stronger. But energy dissipates rather quickly as distances grow from epicenters — and the ground beneath Port-au-Prince is less stable by comparison and “shakes like jelly,” University of Miami geologist Tim Dixon said.
Survivors of Haiti’s quake described abject panic — much of it well-founded as buildings imploded around them. Many Haitians grabbed cement pillars only to watch them crumble in their hands.
Haitians were not schooled in how to react — by sheltering under tables and door frames, and away from glass windows.
Chileans, on the other hand, have homes and offices built to ride out quakes, their steel skeletons designed to sway with seismic waves rather than resist them.
“When you look at the architecture in Chile you see buildings that have damage, but not the complete pancaking that you’ve got in Haiti,” said Cameron Sinclair, executive director of Architecture for Humanity, a 10-year-old nonprofit that has helped people in 36 countries rebuild after disasters.
Sinclair said he has architect colleagues in Chile who have built thousands of low-income housing structures to be quake-resistant.
Haiti has no building code.
Patrick Midy, a leading Haitian architect, said he knew of only three earthquake-resistant buildings in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country.
Sinclair’s San Francisco-based organization received 400 requests for help the day after the Haiti quake but he said it had yet to receive a single request for help for Chile.
“On a per-capita basis, Chile has more world-renowned seismologists and earthquake engineers than anywhere else,” said Brian Tucker, president of GeoHazards International, a nonprofit organization based in Palo Alto, California.
Their advice is heeded by the government in Latin America’s wealthiest country, getting built not just into architects’ blueprints and building codes, but also into government contingency planning.
“The fact that [Chilean] President [Michelle Bachelet] was out giving minute-to-minute reports a few hours after the quake in the middle of the night gives you an indication of their disaster response,” Sinclair said.
Most Haitians didn’t know if Haitian Pesident Rene Preval was alive or dead for at least a day after the quake. The National Palace and his residence — like most government buildings — had collapsed.
Haitian TV, cellphone networks and radio stations were knocked off the air by the seismic jolt.
Colonel Hugo Rodriguez, commander of the Chilean aviation unit attached to the UN peacekeeping force in Haiti, waited anxiously on Saturday with his troops for word from loved ones at home.
He said he knew his family was OK and expressed confidence that Chile would ride out the disaster.
“We are organized and prepared to deal with a crisis, particularly a natural disaster,” Rodriguez said. “Chile is a country where there are a lot of natural disasters.”
Calais said that frequent seismic activity is as common to Chile as it is to the rest of the Andean ridge.
“It’s quite likely that every person there has felt a major earthquake in their lifetime,” he said, “Whereas the last one to hit Port-au-Prince was 250 years ago.”
On Port-au-Prince’s streets on Saturday, many people had not heard of Chile’s quake. More than half a million are homeless, most still lack electricity and are preoccupied with finding enough to eat.
Fanfan Bozot, a 32-year-old reggae singer, could only shake his head at his government’s reliance on international relief to distribute food and water.
“Chile has a responsible government,” he said, waving his hand in disgust. “Our government is incompetent.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema