The Haiti earthquake

At 4:53 in the afternoon on January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck about 25 kilometers west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. The shaking was shallow and violent. It destroyed the presidential palace, parliament, the cathedral and tens of thousands of homes and offices. Around 1.5 million people ended up in tents and camps.¹

Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas, and Port-au-Prince had grown rapidly with little building regulation, and with many poorly built concrete structures. The quake came from the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault, which had last destroyed Port-au-Prince in 1751 and 1770. The death toll is disputed: the Haitian government reported over 300,000, while later studies suggested far lower figures, with some estimates between about 46,000 and 85,000. What is certain is that it was among the deadliest earthquakes of the century.⁴²

International donors pledged billions of dollars, but many people criticized the slow pace of reconstruction and the roles of foreign agencies. In October 2010 cholera, which had not been seen in Haiti in modern times, broke out in the Artibonite region, and investigators traced it to a UN peacekeeping camp. About 10,000 people died and some 800,000 fell ill. The United Nations acknowledged a moral responsibility in 2016. Haiti suffered further blows with another earthquake in August 2021, the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in July 2021 and the spread of armed gangs.³