Haiti Death Toll Could Exceed 250,000, RMS Says 

NU Online News Service, Jan. 27, 3:15 p.m. EST

The Haitian earthquake caused an estimated 250,000 fatalities—and disease, starvation and lack of medical care could push the death toll higher, a catastrophe modeling firm said.

Risk Management Solutions in Newark Calif., said the quake, which destroyed more than 4,000 buildings in Port-au-Prince alone, had limited impact on the insurance industry, but raises questions about the earthquake risk across the Caribbean, the potential of an earthquake on nearby faults, and what lessons can be drawn from an event such as this.

In response, the firm issued a report to answer a list of frequently asked questions. RMS said Haitian earthquake fatalities could potentially increase in coming weeks due to compounding factors, such as infectious disease spread, lack of food and water, and limited access to medical care.

Among other points mentioned in the FAQ report:

• Over 90 percent of the walls of Haiti’s buildings are constructed using either concrete/blocks, earthen materials, woven wood mats, or bricks and rocks. These heavy materials used to construct the walls, often with no reinforcement, caused numerous building collapses, resulting in extensive property damage and loss of life.

• While the primary damage from an earthquake is due to ground shaking, secondary hazards are phenomena that can cause additional loss to people and property at risk. The most relevant secondary hazards are liquefaction and landslide—both of which played a role in increasing Haiti’s damage and loss.

• According to a stress analysis, the latest quake has loaded up pressure on adjacent fault lines to the west of Port-au-Prince along the Enriquillo fault, which will be enough to trigger earthquakes on the adjacent segments—“particularly if those fault segments were close to failure prior to the January 12 earthquake.” RMS said.

• Stress calculations indicating a clustering of aftershocks at the western end of the rupture are reasonable since no significant earthquake has occurred along the adjacent segments in the last 150 years, the firm said.

• Of particular concern following the Haiti Earthquake is the damage to informal housing in shanty towns on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. The firm noted that as rural poor migrate to the major cities, they often take up residence in shanty towns built with substandard construction that cannot stand up to the natural hazards that are present across so many capital cities—from hurricanes to landslides and earthquakes.

RMS said it is currently carrying out a new type of collaborative model development effort designed to quantify the economic and humanitarian impacts of future earthquakes on capital cities in developing countries, with South America as an initial test case.

The complete FAQ report is online at http://www.rms.com/Publications/Haiti_Earthquake_FAQ.pdf.

• • 2/6/2010 3:27:24 AM
  • roger hubert
  • Supply distruibution
  • As these lines of Haitian folks form at supply outlets, the US and other agenices should switch their way of giving out suppies. We called it truck-drop back in the army, and that is where you let the line stay put, and you travel down the line passing out food/water. You can hand it out without waiting for each person to come forward, receive, and wait for them to fight back out of the way. Traveling down the line becomes so much faster, and you can reach the ones who are injured or too weak, young or old, to stay in a constantly pressed moving line of people. Let the trucks move along the lines. The people's line will be your path to follow. No pile-ups of mad or grabing riots can form. The people can stay in place to eat, drink water, and not be having to be in way of folks behind them awaiting supplies. A line path a mile long, or miles long, your trucks reach so many more people and many times faster, then the folks having to walk those miles to one point. Think of our ice cream trucks covering a whole neighborhood, instead of the neighborhood covering the ice cream truck. That's the idea.

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