Haiti Earthquake (2010)

Question 1

General facts

Answer 1

• 70% of jobs are in the informal economy
• 25% of people live in extreme poverty
• 50% of the population is under 20 years old
• Port-au-Prince, the capital, has a population of 3.5 million

Question 2

What happened?

Answer 2

• magnitude 7 earthquake
• conservative plate margin
• shallow focus of 5 miles

Question 3

Primary impacts

Answer 3

• 316,000 killed, 1 million homeless
• 250,000 homes and 60% of government building destroyed or damaged
• 50 hospitals and 1,300 schools destroyed
• main prison destroyed, 4,000 inmates escaped

Question 4

Secondary impacts

Answer 4

• 20% of people lost their jobs because of building collapse
• hospitals and morgues were full so bodies were piled up on the streets
• this led to the spread of diseases, especially cholera
• hard to get aid into the area because the airport was destroyed and the country was massively disorganised

Question 5

Short-term responses

Answer 5

+810,000 people placed in aid camps
+$100 million given by USA, $330 million by the EU
-lack of immediate aid because of poor planning so search and rescue had to be done by locals
+4.3 million provided with food rations in the following weeks

Question 6

Long-term responses

Answer 6

-by 2015, incomes, health, housing and food supply remained worse than pre-disaster levels
+water and sanitation eventually supplied for 1.7 million people
-1 million people still without houses by 2011 so have to live in aid camps
+temporary schools and new teachers trained