Ilan Kelman - Disaster By Choice: How our actions turn natural hazards into catastrophes

Another hot, humid, dusty day in the streets of a Caribbean capital. Flies crowd the markets and aged motorbikes and cars bounce through the potholes, coughing emissions and dodging pedestrians. Azure waves lap against the docks while street dogs and pigs scrounge for morsels in the trash heaps dotting the hill neighbourhoods. Just the typical sights, sounds, odours, and haze of life playing out as it has thousands of times before, with the shimmering heat starting to dissipate as the sun droops towards evening.

Today, though, is far from typical. It is 4.53 p.m. on Tuesday 12th January 2010 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Twenty-five kilometres west-south-west of the city, just thirteen kilometres below the surface, the earth jolts, fracturing rock, heaving soil, and radiating waves of motion with an intensity technically described as moment magnitude 7.0. This is high on the scale with which earthquakes are measured; just one or two earthquakes at this level or stronger occur in any month somewhere in the world, although often much deeper below the surface than Haiti experiences on this day.

The earthquakes first set of waves, the primary waves, travel twenty times faster than most passenger jets, giving premonitions of the coming destruction. Port-au-Prince has the misfortune of being so close to the ruptures centre that most people have only seconds before the secondary set of waves, the shear waves travelling half as fast, arrive. The devastation begins.

The arrondissement (district) of Logne, almost on the earthquakes epicentre, witnesses over 80 per cent of its buildings badly damaged or destroyed. Many rural areas lose the little infrastructure they have, with dirt roads cut by landslips and schools entombing pupils and staff. Around the capital, thirty kilometres away, the shaking lasts for between thirty and sixty seconds. Thousands of buildings crumble, especially the shoddily built, ramshackle dwellings inhabited by people with no choice but to live there. Some buildings collapse in on themselves or tip over. Others slide down the hills into the ravines. The stories of the people who live in these homes are rarely told: people who scrape by day to day, ambling along the unpaved roads, living without running water, electricity, or sewage systems, and then dying in the ruins of their small, dilapidated shelter.

As one lives poor, one dies poor. The immediate aftermath could not bring ambulances and fire trucks wailing through the streets, with hard-hatted rescuers ready to haul out unconscious survivors, stabilize them right there, and then whisk them away to advanced life support in hospitals. Instead, roads are impassable to cars, vans, and trucksas many were before the earthquake, with these vehicles stymied by the steep slopes, the inadequate infrastructure, and the difficulty of driving after dark. Rescue and medical services do not exist to respond, and this too is a situation long predating the earthquake. As the sun sets, the survivors wonder what to do about water, food, toilets, and sleepingquestions many of them asked every day.