The flimsy houses that dot the hillside community of Canapé-Vert were reduced to a wasteland of rubble by the most devastating earthquake to hit Haiti in 200 years.
Fewer than half the shanties remained standing after the 7.0-magnitude nightmare that leveled Port-au-Prince tore a particularly vicious path through the suburb.
“Please take me out. I am dying. I have two children with me,” a woman told a Reuters reporter from beneath a collapsed school in the ravaged town.
Nearby, at the Canapé-Vert hospital, a crowd of the walking wounded pushed toward the entrance as bodies, covered in sheets, lined the road.
Screams could be heard inside the facility.
Poorly constructed structures like those in Canapé-Vert often see calamitous effects when a natural disaster strikes, says a Columbia University earthquake researcher.
“What matters is how the buildings are constructed, what people live in and what the infrastructure is like,” said Arthur Lerner-Lam, of the university’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
Similarly sized earthquakes in developed countries have caused far less damage and death, he noted.
The 1989 San Francisco earthquake, which hit 6.9 on the Richter scale, was nearly as strong as the Haiti quake and damaged thousands of buildings — but killed just 63 people.
In Port-au-Prince, by contrast, thousands of people and corpses were still believed to have been entombed by collapsed buildings yesterday. “We see vastly different amounts of damage depending on the degree of development,” Lerner-Lam said. “It’s an irreducible fact that poverty amplifies casualties and damages in disasters like this.”
The quake was the first major temblor in more than 200 years on the Haiti section of the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault line, which extends from the southern Dominican Republic west to Jamaica, passing through Haiti just south of Port-au-Prince.
The last major quake on the fault was in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1907.
Even though the Haitian section of the fault had been dormant for years, scientists were worried. A 1985 paper by Columbia researchers noted the possibility of a major quake in the area.
More recent studies by US and Jamaican researchers, led by a University of Texas professor, specifically warn of the potential for a big quake. In a 2006 paper, the researchers said further study of the fault “should be considered high priority in Jamaica, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.”