Nothing can really communicate to us the shocking power of the event itself—an upheaval of the ground beneath our feet. That which is most physically solid to us, the earth and the gravity we struggle against, suddenly disrupted by the life-giving (and life-stealing) energies deep underground.
It’s like describing the explosion of a volcano, or a nuclear bomb. What words can describe it? There’s a strong element of “you had to be there”.
But we can be there for the aftermath, both in person and virtually. The virtual presence is now helping those of us who feel we can do little more for Haitians than lift our cell phone and punch in a few numbers to send $10 to the American Red Cross. It’s a simple act that’s been worth about $10 million and counting. No more of those check processing fees, although the cellular providers are profiting by it, no doubt. Those who fear for loved ones in the aftermath can learn about them more quickly than ever before. And the Twitterverse seems to the perfect tool to witness the ongoing struggle for survival and recovery.
It’s impossible to call the survivors lucky. This is Haiti, after all, where an ecological disaster akin to Easter Island has left the country with little forested land, where hurricanes rage almost yearly, and where a legacy of brutal slavery has led to social injustices that linger to this day.
In 1946, nearby Dominican Republic suffered an 8.0 earthquake that most people survived because they were outside on holiday—a subsequent tsunami did kill thousands. For Haiti, we can blame cruel circumstance. It wasn’t so much the magnitude of the quake—7.0—that hurt, it was the location just 6.2 miles under a point about 10 miles from downtown Port-au-Prince, where buildings are designed to weather to tropical storms, not tremors from below. It was a recipe for calamity, and it could have been worse. Just four months ago, the small island protectorate of American Somoa, famous for its output of NFL players and the only populated American possession south of the equator, was hit with a 8.0 magnitude earthquake just 11 miles or so under the earth’s surface. The resulting tsunami wiped out villages and killed a dozen people. In the Haiti, the toll would have been phenomenal.
Without immediate help, the consequences are far graver than the victims of Hurricane Katrina. In 1770, an earthquake liquefied the ground beneath Port-au-Prince, leveling the city and causing a tsunami that destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of slaves. Society, such as it was, collapsed, leading to far more deaths through violence, tainted food, and disease. This is the road Haiti is about to travel down again, and the U.S. and others must surmount the logistics of delivering food, water, and shelter before the true trappings of civilization—mercy, patience, and caring—crumble.
Thankfully, our ability to communicate has made great strides, even in just the last decade. The attacks of 9/11 led to an overwhelmed cellular network. Hurricane Katrina vaporized an infrastructure. In Haiti, all communications except for shortwave radio were briefly wiped out. But assets from a previous crisis—Hurricane Ike—were redeployed in just a few days, bringing wireless communication back to the island nation relatively quickly.
Predicting these earthquakes is the ultimate necessity. Until then, we must rely on our ability to react using the tools we have at hand, even if it is only a keyboard on a cellphone.
