The earthquake occurred on a fault system between the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates.
Tiny dots of white against the plant-covered landscape (red in this image) are possible landslides, a common occurrence in mountainous terrain after large earthquakes.
The Mw 7.0 magnitude earthquake occurred inland, on 12 January 2010 at 16:53 UTC-5, approximately 25 kilometres (16 mi) WSW from Port-au-Prince at a depth of 13 kilometres (8.1 mi)[5] on the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault system.[24] Strong shaking associated with intensity IX on the Modified Mercalli scale (MM) was recorded in Port-au-Prince and its suburbs. It was also felt in several surrounding countries and regions, including Cuba (MM III in Guantánamo), Jamaica (MM II in Kingston), Venezuela (MM II in Caracas), Puerto Rico (MM II–III in San Juan), and the bordering country of the Dominican Republic (MM III in Santo Domingo).[25] According to estimates from the USGS, approximately 3.5 million people lived in the area that experienced shaking intensity of MM VII to X, a range that can cause moderate to very heavy damage even to earthquake-resistant structures.
The quake occurred in the vicinity of the northern boundary where the Caribbean tectonic plate shifts eastwards by about 20 millimetres (0.79 in) per year in relation to the North American plate. The strike-slip fault system in the region has two branches in Haiti, the Septentrional-Orient fault in the north and the Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden fault in the south; both its location and focal mechanism suggest that the January 2010 quake was caused by a rupture of the Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden fault, which had been locked for 250 years, gathering stress. The stress would ultimately have been relieved either by a large earthquake or a series of smaller ones.[26] The rupture of this Mw 7.0 earthquake was roughly 65 kilometres (40 mi) long with mean slip of 1.8 metres (5.9 ft).[27] Preliminary analysis of the slip distribution found amplitudes of up to about 4 metres (13 ft) using ground motion records from all over the world.[28][29]
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued a tsunami warning immediately after the initial quake,[30] but quickly cancelled it.[31] Nearly two weeks later, CNN reported that the beach of the small fishing town of Petit Paradis was hit by a localised tsunami wave shortly after the earthquake.[32]
A 2006 earthquake hazard study by C. DeMets and M. Wiggins-Grandison noted that the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone could be at the end of its seismic cycle and predicted a worst-case scenario of a magnitude 7.2 earthquake, similar in size to the 1692 Jamaica earthquake.[33] Paul Mann and a group including the 2006 study team presented a hazard assessment of the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault system to the 18th Caribbean Geologic Conference in March 2008, noting the large strain (overall equivalent to a 7.2 Mw earthquake); the team recommended "high priority" historical geologic rupture studies, as the fault was fully locked and had recorded few earthquakes in the preceding 40 years.[34] An article published in Haiti's Le Matin newspaper in September 2008 cited comments by geologist Patrick Charles to the effect that there was a high risk of major seismic activity in Port-au-Prince.[35]
Aftershocks
History of the main shock and aftershocks with magnitudes larger than 4.0, data from USGS
[36] The United States Geological Survey (USGS) recorded six aftershocks in the two hours after the main earthquake. The aftershocks were at magnitudes of approximately 5.9,[37] 5.5,[38] 5.1,[37] 4.5,[37] and 4.5.[37] Within the first nine hours 26 aftershocks of magnitude 4.2 or greater were recorded, 12 of which measured magnitude 5.0 or greater,[39] and on January 24 USGS reported that there had been 52 aftershocks measuring 4.5 or greater since the January 12 quake.[7]
On 20 January at 06:03 local time (11:03 UTC) the strongest aftershock since the earthquake,[40] measuring magnitude 5.9 Mw, struck Haiti.[41] The U.S. Geological Survey reported its epicentre was about 56 kilometres (35 miles) WSW of Port-au-Prince,[42] which would place it almost exactly under the coastal town of Petit-Goâve. A UN representative reported that the aftershock collapsed seven buildings in the town.[43] According to staff of the International Committee of the Red Cross, who had reached Petit-Goâve for the first time the day before the aftershock, the town was estimated to have lost 15% of its buildings, and was suffering the same shortages of supplies and medical care as the capital.[44] Workers from the charity Save the Children reported hearing "already weakened structures collapsing" in Port-au-Prince,[40] but most sources reported no further significant damage to infrastructure in the city. Further casualties are thought to have been minimal since people had been sleeping in the open.[43]
Future risk
Eric Calais, a geophysicist at Purdue University who has conducted research in the area for years, and colleagues, and Ross Stein of the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, and colleagues have independently calculated that the earthquake has increased the risk on other segments of the Enriquillo fault and perhaps on other faults, although the quake probably did not increase the risk (which is already known to be high) of a major tremor on the Septentrional fault. Stein suggests that if the calculations are right—noting that they may well not be—something may be "fundamentally locked in some fashion, on pretty much all scales, and might be capable of popping off something large"[45]. Historical accounts, although not precise, suggest that there has been a sequence of quakes progressing westwards along the fault, starting with an earthquake in the Dominican Republic in 1751. There are concerns that the 12 January earthquake could be the beginning of a new long-term sequence: "the whole region is fearful".
Damage to infrastructure
Damaged buildings in Port-au-Prince
Essential services
Amongst the widespread devastation and damage throughout Port-au-Prince and elsewhere, vital infrastructure necessary to respond to the disaster was severely damaged or destroyed. This included all hospitals in the capital; air, sea, and land transport facilities; and communication systems.
The quake affected the three Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) medical facilities around Port-au-Prince, causing one to collapse completely.[46][47] A hospital in Pétionville, a wealthy suburb of Port-au-Prince, also collapsed,[48] as did the St. Michel District Hospital in the southern town of Jacmel,[49] which was the largest referral hospital in south-east Haiti.[50]
Damaged buildings in Jacmel
The quake seriously damaged the control tower at Toussaint L'Ouverture International Airport[51] and the Port-au-Prince seaport,[52] which rendered the harbour unusable for immediate rescue operations. The Gonaïves seaport, in the northern part of Haiti, remained operational.[52]
Roads were blocked with debris or the surfaces broken. The main road linking Port-au-Prince with Jacmel remained blocked ten days after the earthquake, hampering delivery of aid to Jacmel. When asked why the road had not been opened, Hazem el-Zein, head of the south-east division of the UN World Food Programme said that "We ask the same questions to the people in charge...They promise rapid response. To be honest, I don't know why it hasn't been done. I can only think that their priority must be somewhere else."[49]
There was considerable damage to communications infrastructure. The public telephone system was not available,[30] and two of Haiti's largest cellular telephone providers, Digicel[53] and Comcel Haiti,[54] both reported that their services had been affected by the earthquake. Fibre-optic connectivity was also disrupted.[55] According to Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF), most of the radio stations went off the air and only 20 of the 50 stations in Port-au-Prince were back on air a week after the earthquake.[56]
General infrastructure
The New York Times reported on 28 January that 20,000 commercial buildings and 225,000 residences had collapsed or were severely damaged and need to be demolished.[10] The deputy mayor of Léogâne reported that 90% of the town's buildings had been destroyed.[57] The buildings of the finance ministry, the ministry of education, the ministry of public works, the ministry of communication and culture, the Palace of Justice, the Superior Normal School, the National School of Administration, the Institut Aimé Césaire, the National Assembly, the Supreme Court and Port-au-Prince Cathedral were damaged to varying degrees.[58][59][60] The National Palace was severely damaged,[61][62] though President René Préval and his wife Elisabeth Delatour Préval escaped injury.[63][64] The Prison Civile de Port-au-Prince was also destroyed, allowing 4,000 inmates to escape into the streets.[65]
Léogâne, close to the earthquake epicentre
Most of Port-au-Prince's municipal government buildings were destroyed or heavily damaged, including the City Hall, which was described by the Washington Post as, "a skeletal hulk of concrete and stucco, sagging grotesquely to the left."[66] Port-au-Prince had no municipal petrol reserves and few city officials had working mobile phones before the earthquake, complicating communications and transportation.[66]
Minister of Education Joel Jean-Pierre stated that the education system had "totally collapsed". About half the nation's schools and the three main universities in Port-au-Prince were affected.[67] The earthquake also destroyed a nursing school in the capital and severely damaged the country’s primary midwifery school.[68] The Haitian art world also suffered great losses. Artworks were destroyed, and museums and art galleries were extensively damaged, among them Port-au-Prince's main art museum, Centre d'Art, College Saint Pierre and Holy Trinity Cathedral.[69]
The headquarters of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) at Christopher Hotel[14] and offices of the World Bank were destroyed.[70] The building housing the offices of Citibank in Port-au-Prince collapsed, killing five employees.[71] The clothing industry, which accounts for two-thirds of Haiti's exports,[72] reported structural damage at manufacturing facilities.[73] Up to 200 guests at the collapsed Hôtel Montana in Port-au-Prince are presumed dead.[74]
Buildings shook in Santo Domingo, the capital of the neighbouring Dominican Republic, but no major damage was reported.[75]
Conditions in the aftermath
In the nights following the earthquake, many people in Haiti slept in the streets, on pavements, in their cars, or in makeshift shanty towns either because their houses had been destroyed, or they feared standing structures would not withstand aftershocks.[76] Construction standards are low in Haiti; the country has no building codes. Engineers have stated that it is unlikely many buildings would have stood through any kind of disaster. Structures are often raised wherever they can fit; some buildings were built on slopes with insufficient foundations or steel works.[77] A representative of Catholic Relief Services has estimated that about two million Haitians lived as squatters on land they did not own. The country also suffered from shortages of fuel and potable water even before the disaster.[78]
President Préval and government ministers used police headquarters near the Toussaint L'Ouverture International Airport as their new base of operations, although their effectiveness was extremely limited; several parliamentarians were still trapped in the Presidential Palace, and offices and records had been destroyed.[79] Some high-ranking government workers lost family members, or had to tend to wounded relatives. Although the president and his remaining cabinet met with UN planners each day, there remained confusion as to who was in charge and no single group had organised relief efforts as of 16 January.[80] The government handed over control of the airport to the United States to hasten and ease flight operations, which had been hampered by the damage to the air traffic control tower.[81]
Urban Search and Rescue specialists work at the Hotel Montana.
Almost immediately Port-au-Prince's morgue facilities were overwhelmed. By 14 January, a thousand bodies had been placed on the streets and pavements. Government crews manned trucks to collect thousands more, burying them in mass graves.[82] In the heat and humidity, corpses buried in rubble began to decompose and smell. Mati Goldstein, head of the Israeli ZAKA International Rescue Unit delegation to Haiti, described the situation as "Shabbat from hell. Everywhere, the acrid smell of bodies hangs in the air. It’s just like the stories we are told of the Holocaust – thousands of bodies everywhere. You have to understand that the situation is true madness, and the more time passes, there are more and more bodies, in numbers that cannot be grasped. It is beyond comprehension."[83][84]
Mayor Jean-Yves Jason said that officials argued for hours about what to do with the volume of corpses. The government buried many in mass graves, some above-ground tombs were forced open so bodies could be stacked inside, and others were burned.[85] Mass graves were dug in a large field outside the settlement of Titanyen, north of the capital; tens of thousands of bodies were reported as having been brought to the site by dump truck and buried in trenches dug by earth movers.[86] Max Beauvoir, a Vodou priest, protested the lack of dignity in mass burials, stating, "... it is not in our culture to bury people in such a fashion, it is desecration".[87][88]
The Haitian government began a programme to move homeless people out of Port-au-Prince on a ferry to
Port Jeremie and in hired buses to temporary camps.
Towns in the eastern Dominican Republic began preparing for tens of thousands of refugees, and by 16 January hospitals close to the border had been filled to capacity with Haitians. Some began reporting having expended stocks of critical medical supplies such as antibiotics by 17 January.[89] The border was reinforced by Dominican soldiers, and the government of the Dominican Republic asserted that all Haitians who crossed the border for medical assistance would be allowed to stay only temporarily. A local governor stated, "We have a great desire and we will do everything humanly possible to help Haitian families. But we have our limitations with respect to food and medicine. We need the helping hand of other countries in the area."[90][91]
Slow distribution of resources in the days after the earthquake resulted in sporadic violence, with looting reported.[92] There were also accounts of looters wounded or killed by vigilantes and neighbourhoods that had constructed their own roadblock barricades.[93][94] Dr Evan Lyon of Partners in Health, working at the General Hospital in Port-Au-Prince, claimed that misinformation and overblown reports of violence had hampered the delivery of aid and medical services.[95][96]
One of the first parachute air drops after the quake, 18 January
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton acknowledged the problems and said Americans should "not be deterred from supporting the relief effort" by upsetting scenes such as those of looting.[65][97] Lt. Gen. P.K. Keen, deputy commander of U.S. Southern Command, however, announced that despite the stories of looting and violence, there was less violent crime in Port-au-Prince after the earthquake than before.[98]
In many neighbourhoods, singing could be heard through the night and groups of men coordinated to act as security as groups of women attempted to take care of food and hygiene necessities.[99] During the days following the earthquake, hundreds were seen marching through the streets in peaceful processions, singing and clapping.[100]
Casualties
A Haitian boy receives treatment at a MINUSTAH logistics base.
The earthquake struck in the most populated area of the country. The International Red Cross announced that as many as 3 million people had been affected by the quake.[8] On 28 January the Haitian government gave a confirmed death toll of 170,000,[9] with many more thousands dead in the rubble and outside the capital, and not including unreported bodies buried by relatives.[101]
Haitian authorities also estimated that 250,000 people sustained injuries, and as many as one million Haitians were left homeless.[102] Experts have questioned the validity of these numbers; Anthony Penna, professor emeritus in environmental history at Northeastern University, warned that casualty estimates could only be a "guesstimate",[103] and Belgian disaster response expert Claude de Ville de Goyet noted that "round numbers are a sure sign that nobody knows."[104] Edmond Mulet, UN Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, said, "I do not think we will ever know what the death toll is from this earthquake",[104] while the director of the Haitian Red Cross, Guiteau Jean-Pierre, noted that his organisation had not had the time to count bodies, as their focus had been on the treatment of survivors.[104]
The vast majority of casualties were Haitian civilians, but among the dead were aid workers, embassy staff, foreign tourists and a number of public figures which included Archbishop of Port-au-Prince Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot,[11] aid worker Zilda Arns and officials in the Haitian government, including opposition leader Michel "Micha" Gaillard.[12] Also killed were a number of well-known Haitian musicians[105] and sports figures, including thirty members of the Fédération Haïtienne de Football.[106] At least 85 United Nations personnel working with MINUSTAH were killed,[107] among them the Mission Chief, Hédi Annabi, and his deputy, Luiz Carlos da Costa.[15]
Early response
Heavy-lifting helicopters ferry water from the offshore flotilla, 15 January.
Appeals for humanitarian aid were issued by many aid organisations, the United Nations[108] and president René Préval.[109] Raymond Joseph, Haiti's ambassador to the United States,[110] and his nephew, singer
