The root cause of disasters │ The Science of Disasters with Ilan Kelman
On 12 January 2010, southern Haiti was rocked by a major earthquake.
This day was seen as a major disaster.
But was it really the earthquake that killed 200,000 people and shattered towns and cities? There’s a lot more to the story.
Join Ilan Kelman, Professor of Disasters and Health at University College London, for this series, The Science of Disasters, in which he explains exactly what constitutes a disaster, why they happen and how we can better prepare for them.
Find out more:
Ilan Kelman https://www.ucl.ac.uk/risk-disaster-r...
What defines a disaster https://www.ifrc.org/en/what-we-do/di...
Haiti earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Ha...
This series was produced with our partner Pint of Science! Find out more: www.pintofscience.com
What leads to all the destruction when an earthquake happens? Is it the natural event alone or was human decision-making a contributory factor? Stay with me, Ilan Kelman, to find out.
On 12th January 2010, southern Haiti was rocked by an earthquake, shattering the capital city and towns around it, with perhaps 200 000 people or more killed immediately. This day was seen as a major disaster, a disaster event, so that international relief poured in and the world's hearts opened up to the country. Yet the people died because of infrastructure collapses, not because of the earthquake. Even though the earthquake rumbled through in barely a minute, it took a long time to build infrastructure so that it collapses in an earthquake. That is, it took a long time to create and maintain the vulnerability which killed so many people on that fateful Tuesday.
It takes time to implement poor urban planning, it takes time to build a lot of bad structures, it takes time to create ingrained sexism, injustice, poor governance, under development and woeful economics and livelihoods. Haiti did not become earthquake-vulnerable overnight, so the earthquake disaster did not happen on only the 12th of January.
Haiti gained its independence in 1804. France and the US mainly, which were powers at that time, did not want a colony to dare assert its sovereignty. Until 1986, they had a significant say in who ran Haiti (generally a brutal dictator) and how Haiti was run (generally a corrupt and totalitarian regime). Finally, in 1986, some form of democracy came to Haiti after a popular uprising. But in 2004 the US again sent in troops to depose an elected leader. The country was only starting to settle down politically to some extent when the earthquake struck.
This is vulnerability: no choices, no resources, no access to options for the people who were killed. External rich powerful forces decided who would be vulnerable in Haiti and why, protecting themselves at the expense of the people. The earthquake was not the disaster but the inability to deal with a known environmental event. After all, Haiti had experienced earthquakes in previous centuries and was known to be a seismic zone.
In 1842, a quake about 10 times as powerful as that of 2010 rocked the country. Hesketh Prichard, a British ex-explorer and then a first world war sniper, referred to it in a scientific article of 1900. Another research piece from 1912 mentions 1842, alongside the major damage around Port-au-Prince from shakings in 1751 and 1770. Yet Haiti was kept vulnerable to earthquakes and many other environmental phenomena and processes because the long-term process of vulnerability dictated by the outside world deemed it useful to themselves to make and keep Haiti vulnerable.
This vulnerability to a typical environmental event, such as the earthquake of 2010, emerged over centuries of colonialism and post-colonialism, including exploitation by Haitian elites, as well as by outside forces. The need, for centuries, to have elapsed in order to build up vulnerability is exactly why the disaster was a long-term process. A vulnerability process which always killed Haitians and also non-Haitians in Haiti, rather than the seismic shaking on a specific day. Thus, the earthquake disaster was not an event. It was a long-term disaster process, a process created by society, not by nature.
Are Australia's bushfires a new phenomenon? How did indigenous peoples deal with them differently thousands of years ago? Join me, Ilan Kelman, to find out in the next episode of The Science of Disasters.
