Less than thirty seconds of shaking made Haiti's 2010 quake the century's deadliest
At 16:53 on 12 January 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck just 13 kilometres beneath Haiti, about 25 kilometres from the capital. It lasted under half a minute. Because it was so shallow, and the country so poor, it became the deadliest natural disaster of the 21st century for any single nation.
Haitians call it Goudougoudou, imitating the sound of buildings giving way. The epicentre lay near Léogâne, west of Port-au-Prince, on hidden thrust faults linked to the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden system. It left no visible rupture at the surface, and the main Enriquillo fault apparently did not slip much sideways. The shallow depth made the shaking far more destructive than usual for a quake of that size. Port-au-Prince felt intensity IX on the Modified Mercalli scale, and the tremor reached Cuba, Jamaica, Venezuela and Puerto Rico. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated that about 3.5 million people lived where shaking was strong enough to damage even quake-resistant buildings.
Hispaniola, shared with the Dominican Republic, has a long seismic record. The colonial historian Moreau de Saint-Méry wrote that a 1751 quake left only one masonry building standing in Port-au-Prince and that the whole city fell in 1770. Another in 1842 wrecked Cap-Haïtien and the Sans-Souci Palace, and a 1946 magnitude 8.0 event produced a tsunami. Haiti was also the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, battered by four storms in 2008 alone, and national debt, unfair trade policies and foreign interference had left housing fragile.
Estimates of the dead vary widely and remain disputed: from 100,000 to about 160,000 in some counts, and 220,000 to 316,000 according to the Haitian government. Some three million people were affected, and officials reckoned 250,000 homes and 30,000 commercial buildings were destroyed or badly damaged. The Presidential Palace, the National Assembly and the cathedral were hit, and the collapse of the UN mission headquarters killed its chief, Hédi Annabi.
Many countries sent money, rescuers and medical teams, but damaged ports, airports, hospitals and power lines, plus confusion over who was in charge, slowed the relief. The Hope for Haiti Now telethon on 22 January, the most watched ever, raised US$58 million by the next day. On 23 January the government formally ended the search for survivors.
Source: 2010 Haiti earthquake
