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Even the reporters’ heads seem to be spinning as they try to put what has happened it Haiti in perspective. They try to fall back on numbers and images, but the numbers keep changing and perhaps only a satellite image can convey the magnitude of what has happened. One headline likened it to an atomic bomb striking Port-au-Prince.
The real scope of the disaster hits home when you start looking for facts to help understand this international crisis. We do even know how many people were living in Port-au-Prince before the quake hit with estimates varying by as many as hundreds of thousands: between 2.5 and three million. A doctor I heard on the radio who is working in Haiti said he estimated three-quarters off the city was rubble.
What makes the situation especially grim is that before the quake Haiti had a health care system already in bad need of repair. WHO estimated the healthy life expectancy at birth of the average Haitian to be 43-44 years. A statistic that hit especially hard was that before the quake WHO estimated that the probability of dying between the ages of 15 and 60 was 33% for men and 24% for women.
Before the quake only 70% of the urban population had sustainable access to decent drinking water and only 29% had access to decent sanitation. The quake wiped out even those meager resources. Nineteen percent of all Haitian children under five were underweight and 30% under five had stunted growth.
All these numbers mean that as many as a million of those living in Port-au-Prince were already living on the margins. With the quake destroying hospitals, schools, infrastructure along with homes even those who were fortunate enough to be able to access water and sanitation are now without it.
Tangshan
Seeking to understand what has happened I began researching national disasters. One of the worst quakes in history hit the Chinese city of Tangshan in 1976, killing at least a quarter of a million people. Tangshan’s population at the time was about a million. The picture at the top of this essay is of Tangshan after the quake.
A coal mining town, Tangshan was closed to foreigners for seven years after the disaster. A British journalist was finally able to get into the city and interview some of the survivors. Here is one story:
As I walked home, I passed a fish pond and noticed the fish jumping up out of the water, indicating that the ground temperature had risen very high. That night, I couldn’t sleep, and I lay in bed, just dozing. Suddenly I was woken by a bright flash in the sky and the room was brilliantly lit as if by lightning. There was a roaring sound like a very big wind except that the air was still, and intermittent sounds of explosions. Then a great shaking motion began, up and down.
I was shocked awake by the light, shook my wife awake and spent a long time looking for my slippers. It is my custom to put my slippers on when I get out of bed.
By the time I reached the door, the up-and-down rolling motion had begun, and the building was rocking so much, I couldn’t get the door open. I went back and clung to the bed. Outside the window, the trees were swinging back and forwards crazily. When the rolling motion finished less than a minute later, I opened the door and ran into the courtyard and found that all the buildings around had collapsed.
The reporter noted that because the quake came as Chairman Mao neared death people took it as a sign that political changes were coming.
Even years later when the reporter visited the city he noted thousands of paraplegics filled the hospitals and many were still living in tar paper shelters originally intended to be temporary but were still standing eleven years later.
A Caltech reprint of a Chinese report on Tangshan calls it the greatest earthquake disaster in the history of the world. The introduction states:
The report shows what can happen when an unexpected earthquake strikes an unprepared city.
The report’s four volumes contain a great deal of technical data, but even the titles of the chapters provide some idea of the power of a large earthquake: “Liquification Data of Sandy Soils” and “Liquification of the Saturated Silt Underlying Tianjin Petroleum Plant.” Volume Two contains a thousand pages detailing the damage to buildings in Tangshan. When you scroll down the Table of Contents it provides for sobering reading and a parallel to what has happened in Haiti. Volume three is over 800 pages that record damage to infrastructure.
The last chapter of that volume is titled “Rebuilding Tanshan” and is over a hundred pages long. It took over a minute to download that chapter to read it. Written by three Chinese authors it obviously was heavily censored. Yet it provides some idea of the resources needed to cope with a disaster of that magnitude. The authors note that 110,000 Chinese troops were dispatched to the area.
One story in particular sticks out:
On August 4, the 8th day after the earthquake, the officers and soldiers of the 9th Company heard a weak voice calling for help from the ruins of the Kailuan Hospital. They dug a trench 10 m long in the rubble and prized layers of collapsed floors and after 6 hours, along with the cooperation of the medical team; they finally rescued Wang Shubin who was a worker at the Tangshan Alumina Mine.
I cannot imagine what it would be like to be trapped in rubble for eight days. I would have gone mad.
Another even more unbelievable story comes from the ruins of the same hospital:
They dug a small hole 10 cm in diameter from which a woman’s weak panting was heard. They were afraid of hurting the victim if they were to use power tools. Instead, they used their hands to remove the rubble and broken concrete. More than 10 soldiers carried away three pieces of concrete slabs each weighing more than one ton and they pulled down the shattered wall on the west side. On August 9 they finally rescued the woman, Lu Guilan; having been buried for 303 hours under the ruins.
Do the math–303 hours is ten days. I hope that no one is Port-au-Prince has to endure that.
The report goes on to note that it took another 42,300 people to repair railway damage, 3,000 people to repair power stations and another 100,000 disaster relief workers. To temporarily fix the water supply the Chinese government airlifted 15,000 miles of hose and 40 tons of steel pipe. In this airlift the report notes that the repaired Tanshan airport experienced one take-off every 26 seconds.
Because of the need to coordinate traffic in the devastated city 400 soldiers were brought in for traffic control. A total of 4.87 million kilograms of food needed to be transported to keep people alive. Because it was summer, one of the main worries became the risk of the spread of disease from the thousands of bodies buried in the rubble.
Even with these efforts, one candid sentence in the report notes that two months after the quake sanitary conditions were still poor. The report also points out a problem I had not thought about–what do you do with the garbage in a city that has been virtually destroyed but still has a quarter of a million survivors?
Then comes a section on “Rectifying the social order” that should give us all pause when we think about Haiti:
After the earthquake a small number of people acted improperly. They seized the opportunity to start rumors and spread reactionary and superstitious remarks and created a mood of fear. They robbed private properties, raped women and disturbed the public order.
The Need for Help
What happened in Tangshan will probably never be fully documented, but even allowing for China’s understandable desire to show that heroic measures were taken, that quake should provide a grim picture of what it will take to deal with the disaster in Port-au-Prince.
Behind the numbers that continue to flow from Haiti lie numb people walking the streets with broken limbs, bleeding heads and vacant stares in their eyes. As with any disaster, the press faces the dilemma of showing the unthinkable or averting their eyes. But they have learned from Katrina and other disasters that their pictures of devastation can pack the power to move people to take action and if ever there was a need for action it is now.
If every American would do what they can for the people of Port-au-Prince, as this country responded to the Asian tsunami, perhaps we can help prevent more people from dying. This is not about liberals or conservatives or politics at all–although inevitably it will become political–it is about helping people.
Given the WHO statistics and the Tanshan report this crisis will not be over in a week or even a month. We are talking about rebuilding a major city. What will be needed in the coming weeks will be aid that will prevent the survivors from dying.
Sites across the Internet as well as radio and television networks are posting links to places you can make donations. Here is the link to the CNN site that seemed to me to be the most comprehensive.
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