Haiti Earthquake - An LEDC casetudy

Haiti Earthquake

Key Points

* It is an LEDC (less economically developed country)

* It is on a conservative plate margin

* It is basically the north American and the Caribean plate sliding past each other.

-The earthquake had a shallow focus (9 miles from the capital)

- Because it is an LEDC the homes are not earthquake proof.

- No goverment and so total disruption because no effective goverment means that no help could have been organised.

The problems for the people

- No effective resources to help and aid people

- Only after 3 or 4 days did they surrender to America for help.

- It still took America time to gather together resources that could have benefitted the people in Haiti

- All in all it took 10 days to resources to the suffers of the earthquake

- This meant that they were without food/ water and help for 10 days!!!

- This would have contributed to factors such as malnutrition.

- Obviously, there were people who were bleeding and had terrible wounds, but they had no means of preventing bacteris getting to the wounds and so the wounds got infected.

- There were mud slides, which contributed to the death of many people.

- There were dead bodies in the sea, where people were getting their water from, thus leading to diseases such as typhoid.

- The people of Haiti used oil lamps as electricity is exspensive and in doing so when they used thes oil lamps, during the earthquake they fell over causing fires.

- There were also criminal gangs who stole from others, and as there was no effective goverment, people were being looted and valuable family items were stolen.

* It is known as the fourth deadliest earthquake known to man

* It struck on the 12th of January at 16:56 (so people were working and so there were likely to be more deaths as people were travelling, however, this may have helped the situation as people were more likely to have taken safety measures... eg stand under a door way.)

* It was recorded to be 7.0 on the richter scale AND caused lasting devastation...

-TESTIMONIES-

"People have been loaded on to the back of lorries to get to hospitals" This shows the extent of the damage, there were truck loads of people going to hospitals and so they were likely to be killed as the hospitals could not have dealt with this influx. And so this raised the death toll, also when you have people bleeding with other people bleeding you are bound to transfer infection and so increasing the risk of infection and with the health care being used to its maximum, these people would have died because of infection and so raising the death toll.

- "All the phone network are down" There was no electricity, the country was in sheer sarkness, people could not contact family and this further exacerbated the situation.

- "building were collapsed , people were bleeding, the first aftershock was quite bad and many people fell from building." From this we can learn that the situation in Haiti would have been like a jumble sale. The emergency service would not have been able to get into place as there were buildings in the way and so the roads were bloacked. This added to the desperation and raised the death toll- as the people who were seriously injured were unable to get help and so they were killed because of the lack of aid.