One of the coun­tries we cover reg­u­larly here at the blog had a dev­as­tat­ing dis­as­ter overnight. Haiti suf­fered a 7.0 mag­ni­tude earth­quake which has destroyed the cap­i­tal city of Port-au-Prince. The death toll is already in the hun­dreds of thou­sands but after­shocks keep increas­ing that total.

The Inter­na­tional Red Cross has set up a relief fund for Haiti. They have already released $200,000 of emer­gency aid to the earth­quake vic­tims. Also this post from the ONE Orga­ni­za­tion did a good job in sum­ma­riz­ing the response of aid charities.

From this AFP story that we found at Chan­nel News Asia we read more about the disaster.

Bod­ies lit­tered Haiti’s cap­i­tal Wednes­day after an earth­quake that may have killed thou­sands of peo­ple as it col­lapsed shan­ty­towns, lux­ury hotels and even the pres­i­den­tial palace.

With vic­tims pinned under debris and pow­er­ful after­shocks rat­tling the coun­try, loot­ing broke out soon after the 7.0-magnitude quake which spared no part of the cap­i­tal Port-au-Prince, which was close to the epicentre.

Injured res­i­dents of the crowded city poured into the streets scream­ing in panic with each new tremor. Many bod­ies were just left in the streets or crushed under debris.

The quake top­pled the cupola on the gleam­ing white pres­i­den­tial palace, a major hotel where 200 tourists were miss­ing and the head­quar­ters of the UN mis­sion in Haiti where up to 250 per­son­nel were unac­counted for.
…

Esti­mates of the death toll ranged from hun­dreds to thou­sands but with every hour pass­ing it was becom­ing clear that the destruc­tion and loss of life was catastrophic.

A major inter­na­tional relief oper­a­tion was set under­way with the United States, France, Britain and other coun­tries promis­ing help.

…

Aid group World Vision said it would begin dis­trib­ut­ing first aid kits, blan­kets and potable water to sur­vivors on Wednesday.

This “is espe­cially dev­as­tat­ing in Haiti, where peo­ple are acutely vul­ner­a­ble because of poor infra­struc­ture and extreme poverty,” Edward Brown, World Vision’s US relief direc­tor, said in a statement.

Already the poor­est nation in the Amer­i­cas, Haiti has been hit by a series of recent disasters.

As a back­ground on Haiti, the Toronto Star printed this his­tory on the trou­bled state. For our snip­pet, we fast for­ward to the present day and some stats on the woe­ful state of the country.

Since then, vio­lent crime and drug traf­fick­ing have weak­ened the coun­try as poverty deep­ened. Haiti’s GDP is less than $8 bil­lion a year, mak­ing it one of the world’s poor­est coun­tries. The aver­age salary is $70 a month, unem­ploy­ment is ram­pant and infla­tion tops 14 per cent a year.

Life expectancy is 52 years, 10 per cent of infants die before age 4, almost a third of the pop­u­la­tion are either ill or under­weight, almost half are illiterate.

A series of nat­ural dis­as­ters has destroyed sub­sis­tence liveli­hoods in many parts of Haiti, and the defor­ested land can­not with­stand trop­i­cal storms.

Heav­ily depen­dent on for­eign aid, Haiti has turned to the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity for help. Canada – whose governor-general, Michaëlle Jean, is Hait­ian – pledged $520 mil­lion over a five-year period.

There are a few pos­i­tives: a more sta­ble polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion and a UN-backed cleanup of gangs that ter­ror­ized the cap­i­tal Port-au-Prince. But some fear this lat­est dis­as­ter, a 7.0 earth­quake, could be the tip­ping point toward a failed state.

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