local hazardous setting - Port-Au-Prince

• population is 2 million
• located in Gulf of Gonave in the Caribbean Sea
• Port-Au-Prince is both the capital of Haiti as well as commercial centre
• what hazards is Port most vulnerable to?

  • tropical storms
  • flooding
  • droughts
  • landslides
  • earthquakes
• lies south of Tropic of Cancer in carribean on conservative plate boundary.
• port au prince sits on Caribbean-north American plate boundary that moves 2m a year
• Port au Prince earthquake caused by slip up along an existing fault - Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden fault
• 7 magnitude earthquake
• 13km shallow focus event , happened high in crust and was felt strongly in the epicenter
• earthquake produced severe high-amplitude surface waves

  - love and Raleigh waves
• epicentre - 16 miles west of Port Au Prince
• earthquake caused underwater offshore landslides = lead to minor tsunami
• least developed country in western hemisphere
• GDP of £1,300
• life expectancy = 63 years
• literacy rate = 61%
• 77% of people live on less than $2 a day
• many people are concentrated in flood prone coastal areas
• no evacuation centres
• high areas of rural - urban migration
• mountains topography and faulty limestone leads to buildings prone to collapse due to mass movement
• Haiti has one airport with one runway , control tower was damaged in earthquake
• port was unusable due to damage
• rescue teams from around the world took up 48 hours to arrive in Haiti due to problems - local people had to use their bare hands to pull people out of rubble
• water + food aid took days to arrive (exogenous factor) , not enough to go around
• severe shortage of doctors , people died of injuries like broken limbs
• UN building collapsed , 102 UN workers died which hindered response
• looting and riots broke out
• thousands of prisoners escaped damaged prison
• 220,000 people died
• 12 million displaced - survivors moved away from capital to housing projects such as village Solidarity , seeking better life from Port au Prince (counter-urbanisation)
• 10 months after earthquake , cholera broke out , spread along the Artibonite River , killed 9,000 people and infected 21,000 in 2010. Spread from UN infected troops
• estimated that the earthquake has set Haiti development back 125 years
• 2 million people were left without water + food
• regular powercuts
• crime increasing - sexual violence escalated
• Haiti's concrete is unreinforced , readily crumbs under shaking of earthquakes
• unrest + poverty = rift with substandard and building materials
• Haiti has faced years of exploitation from outside countries , dating back to ensalvement of island's people after Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492
• political unrest within Haiti has resulted in country's current standing as poorest in Latin America