Tuesday’s earth­quake is the 15th dis­as­ter that Haiti has expe­ri­enced sine 2001, and by far the dead­liest. In fact Haiti has not even recov­ered from four dif­fer­ent trop­i­cal storms in 2008.

Some analy­sis pieces have hit the news wires that try to explain why Haiti keeps get­ting bat­tered. Experts say that it’s a com­bi­na­tion of geog­ra­phy, poverty and population.

First, this Cam West News Ser­vice story writ­ten by Mar­garet Munro focuses on the tec­tonic plates that sit beneath Haiti.

“It’s like Haiti is caught in this vice, this sheer between these two plates,” Clague told Can­west News Service.

John Cas­sidy, a quake spe­cial­ist with Nat­ural Resources Canada, says the quake likely moved the earth between half a metre and a metre along a 20-to-30 kilo­me­tre stretch of the Enriquillo-Plaintain Gar­den fault sys­tem that cuts through Haiti.

The U.S Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey reports the fault sys­tem accom­mo­dates — or, when it is stuck, stores — about seven mil­lime­tres a year of the motion gen­er­ated by the Caribbean and North Amer­ica tec­tonic plates mov­ing beneath the region.

The Enriquillo-Plaintain Gar­den fault sys­tem has not pro­duced a major earth­quake in recent decades, but the USGS says it was the likely source of large earth­quakes in 1860, 1770, 1761, 1751, 1684, 1673, and 1618. In 1946, an 8.0-magnitude earth­quake shook Samana, in the neigh­bour­ing Domini­can Repub­lic, killing about 100 people.

Cas­sidy says between 15 to 20 earth­quakes about the size of the Hait­ian quake are gen­er­ated every year by the planet’s geo­log­i­cal recy­cling process.

For­tu­nately most of them occur far from pop­u­lated areas, says Cas­sidy, who expects Tuesday’s quake and its after­shocks will pro­vide insight into the tim­ing and fre­quency of seis­mic activ­ity gen­er­ated by the crustal slabs, called tec­tonic plates, mov­ing around Earth’s surface.

Finally, in this Asso­ci­ated Press arti­cle that we found at Cleveland.com, writer Seth Boren­stein tells us how poverty only exac­er­bates the nat­ural disasters.

Uni­ver­sity of South Carolina’s Susan Cut­ter, who maps out social vul­ner­a­bil­ity to dis­as­ter by county in the United States, said Haiti’s poverty makes smaller dis­as­ters there worse.
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“It’s because they’re so vul­ner­a­ble, any event tips the bal­ance,” said Cut­ter, direc­tor of the school’s Haz­ards and Vul­ner­a­bil­ity Research Insti­tute. “They don’t have the kind of resiliency that other nations have. It doesn’t take much to tip the balance.”

A mag­ni­tude 7 earth­quake is dev­as­tat­ing wher­ever it hits, Cut­ter said. But it’s even worse in a place like Haiti.

One prob­lem is the poor qual­ity of build­ings, Mer­ritt said. Haiti doesn’t have build­ing codes and even if it did, peo­ple who make on aver­age $2 a day can’t afford to build some­thing that can with­stand earth­quakes and hur­ri­canes, he said. Poverty often is a major rea­son for poor infra­struc­ture, Tier­ney said.

Then there’s the defor­esta­tion that leads to mud­slides and flood­ing because Haiti leads the hemi­sphere in tree-clearing, Mer­ritt and oth­ers said. That causes ero­sion which wors­ens flood­ing. The trees are cut down mostly for cook­ing because of the poverty, Mer­ritt said.

Another prob­lem is the inabil­ity to pre­pare for and cope with dis­as­ter, said Mer­ritt, who last fall started work to help train Haitians to pre­pare for dis­as­ters, includ­ing cre­at­ing emer­gency response teams in a coun­try that only has a cou­ple of fire sta­tions. It involved Haiti’s small dis­as­ter bureau, the United Nations, Red Cross and other relief agen­cies and gov­ern­ments. The train­ing man­u­als were still being trans­lated from Eng­lish to Cre­ole when the earth­quake hit, he said.