manmade disaster

[arctic_alpine]

after the earthquake in haiti, there was a lot of nic-er talk about the biblical proportions of the disaster, and less nice talk about it being a curse from a pact with the devil.  less about it being a manmade disaster

Comments

[desh]

I just did the math: The Chile one was 63 times more powerful.

I think part of the death toll difference has to do with the fact that the Chile one struck offshore, and the Haiti one was not only under land, but very close to a large city. But certainly, most of the rest of the difference is directly due to poverty.

[ajcepler]

Chile has a building code. Its buildings are designed to sway during earthquakes.
Haiti has no building code, and it is much poorer. Consequently, much more of the buildings in Haiti fell down than the ones in Chile (in addition to the point made about the location of the epicenter)

[arctic_alpine]

i believe haiti has a building code, but it was almost never enforced, and no one could really afford the materials that would be required to build to code. and then there's the questions about how haiti got to be that poor.