Landslides pose a serious physical and environmental threat to vulnerable communities living in areas of unplanned housing on steep slopes in the Caribbean. Some of these communities have, in the past, had to be relocated, at costs of millions of dollars, because of major slides triggered by tropical storm rainfall. Even so, evidence shows that: (1) risk reduction is a marginal activity; (2) there has been minimal uptake of hazard maps and vulnerability assessments and (3) there is little on-the-ground delivery of construction for risk reduction. This article directly addresses these issues by developing a low-cost approach to the identification of the potential pore pressure changes that trigger such slides.
Unplanned housing developments in vulnerable communities on steep tropical and subtropical hillslopes in many developing countries pose major problems. The authors present a new low-cost, community-based approach to landslide risk reduction and report on the successful pilot undertaken in the Skate Town community, Castries, St. Lucia, West Indies.
A personal narrative of the author's experience of the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, describing a visit to the town of Petit-Goâve, Haiti.
Discusses the reception of South African activist Winnie Madikizela Mandela in the U.S. press, an essay on literature about the suicides of women during India's 1947 partition in Punjab, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
Through a genealogy of Jamaican disaster management, shows how participatory and mitigation techniques were deterritorialized from marginalized experiences of disaster and reterritorialized into mitigation policies through the confluence of local disaster events and the global emergence of sustainable development and resilience theory.
In the Eastern Caribbean construction of drainage networks in communities afforded an improvement in slope stability - after a 1 in 100-year rainfall event there were no landslides on previously unstable slopes in densely populated urban communities. This has been recognised in policy terms in the first ever Caribbean-wide, 5-year risk reduction programme. Such evidence represents an important first step in developing realistic land use policies for landslide-prone areas occupied by those migrating to urban centres in the Eastern Caribbean.
The tropical storm caused huge damage both in terms of human victims and economic losses, related to diffused inundations and landslide phenomena, which may be attributed only partially to the exceptionality of the event. As a matter of fact, in many regions, the inadequate answer of the territory-widely characterized by serious problems of land degradation and an almost complete lack of territorial planning-appears to be the major responsible for the occurred negative effects. The impact assessment, based on the calculation of an Impact Index, confirms this statement.
Analyzes the various natural and man-made hazards that may affect the Cayman Islands and determine the level of exposure of Grand Cayman to these events. The magnitude, frequency, and probability of occurrence of the natural and man-made hazards that may potentially affect the islands are identified and ranked. The more important natural hazard to which the Cayman Islands are exposed is clearly hurricanes. To a lesser degree, the islands may be occasionally exposed to earthquakes and tsunamis. Explosions or leaks of the Airport Texaco Fuel Depot and the fuel pipeline at Grand Cayman are the most significant man-made hazards.
A personal narrative of the author's experience of the January 2010 Haiti earthquake and the aftermath, focusing on the psychological impact of the destruction, the warnings by radio host Ingénieur Preptit who predicted the earthquake, and the lack of government leadership.
A photo essay entitled "Ayiti: Reaching Higher Ground" depicting Haitian people after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti to counter the press coverage of the event, including photographs entitled "Holding Innocence," "We Can Feed the Country," and "Pretty in Pink."
Makes reference to the sixth visit of Radio International Feminista (Feminist International Radio Endeavour, FIRE) on April 8-15, 2011 to highlight the development in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake. Particular focus is offered on the role of Haitian women and other citizens in providing first hand information on policies on international humanitarian aid, offer their inputs to international actions on women's groups and human rights, among others.
Discusses the status of women in Haiti in terms of accessing basic needs and services and education. States that women's invisibility was overshadowed by global media's coverage of the 2010 earthquake, wherein people were exposed to extreme poverty and gender inequity. It adds that Commission of Women Victims for Victims (KOFAVIV) is one of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that helped women victims from the prosecution of assailants.
The head of the IMF has called for a major multilateral aid plan to rebuild Haiti where the fight is still on to save lives after a devastating earthquake. The IMF has promised initial $100 million as emergency funding and urges donors to grant additional debt relief.
This essay is framed around interpretations of Haiti's long history in order to demonstrate that there is neither curse nor punishment in Haiti's history; there is only intrigue, interest, and interference. The natural disasters whether earthquakes or hurricanes do not occur because of some rational targeting of the country but are the results of the arbitrariness of nature.
Argues that neoliberalism carries out its agenda of privatization through public spaces that are never fully dismantled. Draws on empirical research into spaces that exemplify the usefulness of our reading of neoliberal privatization, including aspects of post-Katrina New Orleans and a more thorough case study of a pre- and post-earthquake Haiti and its highly privatized education system.
Considers the potential contribution of traditional construction techniques and materials to rebuilding in Port-au-Prince and other areas in Haiti that were devastated by the 2010 earthquake. Based on different examples of housing that collapsed or was damaged by the earthquake, it shows how traditional construction systems often demonstrated better resilience to earthquakes than buildings constructed with modern materials.
Discusses food aid organization Numana's community-based strategies for organizing food packaging events for Haiti and coordination of nongovernmental organizations for distributing emergency food. A feminist analysis of Numana's principles is compared to a culture-centered, community agency model.
Focuses on the slow progress of Haiti after two years of earthquake in Canada. Offers information on the reconstruction failure of the organization Canadian Red Cross and other communities even after providing the financial help and donations. Also discusses the reasons where the Canadian Red Cross is lacking to improve the condition of Haiti.
The long-term prosperity and peace in Haiti depend on pursuing policies that have realistic prospects for implementation and are mutually coherent. Priorities include reforming the civil service and justice systems, streamlining regulations for business, reconstructing housing and infrastructure, improving schools and health care, and ensuring donor cooperation.
The Sphere Project, "Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Disaster Response," identifies the minimum standards to be attained in disaster response. From a human rights perspective and utilizing key indicators from the Sphere Project as benchmarks, this article reports on an assessment of the living conditions approximately 12 weeks after the earthquake in Parc Jean Marie Vincent, a spontaneous IDP camp in Port-au-Prince.
Examines how post-earthquake conditions in Haiti have left women and girls in a heightened state of vulnerability as well as the ineffectiveness of the U.N. and government to uphold obligations under international law to include grassroots women's leadership in the planning and implementation sessions to address sexual violence in displacement camps.
Drawing on field experiences with the organisation GOAL from the Haitian post-earthquake and cholera epidemic emergencies, provides a brief analysis of what systems worked well to support international non-government organisations and where and how greater support could be provided in a future emergency.
Discusses the importance of US leadership in the reconstruction of Haiti in the wake of the devastating earthquake. Attention is given to unity of effort & the primacy of security in Haiti.
The recurrence of violence in Haiti since February 1986 has generated strong demands for reforms to the security and justice system, in the broader context and process of democratic construction. Important transformations have been implemented, but certain factors have hampered change. Challenges include an institutional culture that resists certain changes, weak links between the police and justice, inadequate support from international actors, and a deeply constraining economic context.
On 12 January 2010, Haiti experienced a 7.0-magnitude earthquake centered 10 miles west-southwest of Port-au-Prince. United Nations estimates indicate that more than 222,000 people were killed, 300,000 injured, and 2.3 million displaced by the earthquake and its 59 aftershocks. At dawn on 13 January, under the direction of United States Southern Command, elements of the Department of Defense arrived to support the Government of Haiti and the US Embassy. The command established Headquarters Joint Task Force-Haiti, with the mission of carrying out humanitarian assistance and disaster-relief operations in support of the United States Agency for International Development, the principal federal agency for the US effort.
Unpacks a politics of life at the heart of community-based disaster management to advance a new understanding of resilience politics. Through an institutional ethnography of participatory resilience programming in Kingston, Jamaica, explores how staff in Jamaica's national disaster management agency engaged with a qualitatively distinct form of collective life in Kingston's garrison districts.
Part of a special journal issue dedicated to strategies for societal renewal in Haiti., It's not the earthquake that kills people, it's the collapse of buildings that were poorly designed and built. This case narrative describes a building model that will work for Haiti and why it is critical to use a homeowner-driven model rather than a donor-driven one.
Part of a special journal issue dedicated to strategies for societal renewal in Haiti., The global community has an obligation to ensure that the reconstruction of Haiti's infrastructure increases economic resilience by adding value to existing assets and reducing vulnerability to external shocks, whether from natural disasters like earthquakes or man-made crises like spiking energy prices. This paper highlights a strategy for coordination across the development process, identifying the roles different partner groups can play, and identifying several priorities for that coordinated effort as the rebuilding process gets underway.
Hundreds of thousands are likely to have died, millions are in need, their homes having been lost. Many wait for medical care. Safe water is in short supply and the rainy season starts in May. Could it have been different in Haiti? Would good planning have eased the pain of the shocks?
The Haiti earthquake prompted offers to send aid and assistance in various forms from governments, nongovernmental organizations, and private foundations. The need for manpower on the ground to orchestrate the relief effort brought together military forces from the world over, to include the United States, which stood up Joint Task Force-Haiti (JTF-H). The combined effort of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti and JTF-H in providing humanitarian assistance to the people of Haiti following the earthquake demonstrates the importance of developing strong relationships, both institutional and personal, with partner nation armies.
Analyzes Cuba's medical role in Haiti since Hurricane Georges in 1998, with particular emphasis on the Cuban government's response to the 2010 earthquake. Examines two central themes. First, it assesses the enormous impact on public health that Cuba has made since 1998, and second, it provides a comparative analysis of Cuba's medical role since the earthquake.
During the summer of 2009 a survey was conducted of 1,800 households in metropolitan Port-au-Prince. Six weeks after the earthquake, an attempt was made re-interview these households. The questionnaire examined mortality and injuries generated by the natural disaster, as well as the character of victimization, food security and living arrangements following the quake.
The problems associated with disaster relief assistance following the Haitian earthquake are described. International aid groups have been ineffective in reaching victims of the earthquake, as the poor administration of relief money has inadequately helped feed the population.
The author's thoughts on service work during a summer 2010 travel course to Haiti with a group from Saint Mary's College of California and reflections on the complexity of service learning and disaster relief work. A dilemma concerning the installation of a rainwater capture system on a house brought to light the issue of what the family thought they needed versus what the group thought they needed. The decision making process is discussed.
Provides background information on emergency Safe Spaces for children and specific information for responses in Haiti and the Solomon Islands. In 2007, both countries experienced natural disasters that resulted in internal displacement of thousands of people. The Save the Children Alliance created Safe Spaces for children living in camps for internally displaced persons. The project sought to accomplish 'B-SAFE' strategies through emergency education, psychosocial, and protection interventions. The B-SAFE strategies are to (B)uild relationships, cooperation, and respect among peers; to (S)creen for high-risk children and youth; (A)ctive, structured learning and life saving information; to (F)acilitate children's natural resilience and a return to normalcy; and to (E)stablish a sense of security and self-esteem.
Discusses the imperative to establish a functioning education system and explores how the earthquake exacerbated perennial challenges to the Haitian education system, while also perhaps offering some hope. Analyzes reconstruction efforts involving the Government of Haiti and such organizations as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, arguing that an education system premised on local ownership and focused on sustainability is Haiti's best hope.
Reviews the discourse, practice and outcomes associated with three parallel stabilization initiatives undertaken in Haiti between 2007 and 2009. Although they shared many similar objectives, the paper describes how these separate interventions mobilized very different approaches. The specific focus is on United States, United Nations and combined Brazilian, Canadian and Norwegian stabilization efforts and their implications for humanitarian actors, including the International Committee of the Red Cross and Medecins Sans Frontieres.
Conducts a case study that examines public and nonprofit organizations that partnered during the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The case study results show that communication, trust, and experience are the most important partnership inputs; the most prevalent governance structure of public-nonprofit partnerships is a lead organization network. Time and quality measures should be considered to assess partnership outputs, and community, network, and organizational actor perspectives must be taken into account when evaluating partnership outcomes.
Disasters are not accidents or acts of God. They are deeply rooted in the histories of the societies in which they occur. Haiti's earthquake may be thought of as a disaster 500 years in the making.
Midwives for Haiti is an organization that focuses on the education and training of skilled birth attendants in Haiti, a country with a high rate of maternal and infant mortality and where only 26% of births are attended by skilled health workers. Following the 2010 earthquake, Midwives for Haiti received requests to expand services and numerous professional midwives answered the call to volunteer.
Provides a brief background of Haiti's economic development over the last several decades, along with the status of women's rights and gender-differentiated socioeconomic outcomes. Analyzes how policy neglect of gender equity in Haiti has contributed to failed economic development and identifies ways that other developing countries have successfully incorporated a focus on gender equity in their development strategy, particularly in the face of natural disaster and financial crisis.
Field hospitals were deployed by the Israel Defense Forces as part of the international relief efforts after major seismic events, one in Haiti (2010) and one in Japan (2011). The aim of this commentary is to share the experiences and lessons learned by field hospital obstetrics and gynecology teams after the major earthquakes in Haiti and Japan.
The 2010 earthquake in Haiti and its aftermath have highlighted inherent but understudied transnational governance and socio-legal complexities of disaster recovery and displacement. This paper examines the key transnational governance and socio-legal issues that have arisen in the South Florida region for four distinct groups: (i) displacees and their related legal, social, cultural, and economic issues; (ii) host communities and governance, legal, and monetary complexities associated with compensation payments (e.g., to hospitals for their services to earthquake survivors); (iii) immigrants within the United States and related legalization and citizenship issues; and (iv) diaspora communities and socio-legal issues related to dual citizenship and their ongoing struggles to have a louder voice in the future of Haiti.
Personal reactions of women to the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Discusses the psychic trauma of living in the Haiti's displacement camps after the earthquake regarding poor access to water, violence against women and instances of forced eviction.
Discusses the January 2010 earthquake that struck in Haiti, focusing on the name of Goudougoudou which Haitians have given the natural disaster. Topics include the onomatopoeic nature of the name which resembles the destruction of buildings, the psychological impact the earthquake has had on Haitian women, and Haiti's efforts to relieve the psychological trauma of the event for children.
The representations of Haiti and Haitians that appeared in mainstream news coverage of the disaster reproduced narratives and stereotypes dating to at least the 19th century. Today, understanding the continuity of these representations matters more than ever.
A discussion on empowering women in Haiti after the earthquake. Headed by the International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region the Haiti Adolescent Girls Network (HAGN) aims to empower and protect vulnerable young women so that they may break the cycle of poverty. The Association por la Promotion de la Famille Haitienne along with HAGN created safe shelters for the young women.
Part of a special journal issue focusing on the role of the U.S. Foreign Service in Haiti., The work USAID and the State Department have done in Haiti after the January 12 earthquake shows why these organizations should take the lead in disaster relief.
Grassroots Haitian movements for social justice have set themselves a formidable task: not only addressing the ongoing humanitarian crisis, but also challenging the reconstruction effort to include their leadership and avoid reproducing the conditions that helped make the earthquake so disastrous.
Proposes to examine the aftermath of the "Goudougoudou," as Haitians now call the earthquake of January 12, 2010, relating it to other events that have taxed Haitian resolve over the course of two centuries.
In the 1980s, the Haitian economy was subordinated within global capitalism through a dual strategy centered on assembly plants in the cities and laissez-faire agricultural policies. Today this strategy is back in the form of a "reconstruction" plan.
In many of the lesser developed areas of the world, regional development planning is increasingly important for meeting the needs of current and future inhabitants. Illustrates how matrix assessment methodology was applied to produce a landslide-susceptibility map for the Commonwealth of Dominica, an island nation in the eastern Caribbean, and how with a follow up study the relative landslide-susceptibility mapping was validated. A second Caribbean application on Jamaica demonstrates how this methodology can be applied in a more geologically complex setting.
Argues that geography and geology sparked the Haitian earthquake, but the extent of the destruction was due to the massive failure of Haitian institutions, in particular the state, and international policy, which predated the earthquake.
Debates over the extent of graphic imagery of death in newspapers often suffer from generalized assertions that are based on inadequate or incomplete empirical evidence. Newspapers are believed to display death in very graphic ways, with particularly the tabloid press assumably leading a race to the bottom. This article reports the results of a study of tabloid and broadsheet images of death from the 2010 Haiti earthquake in eight Western European and North American countries. It shows that, far from omnipresent, graphic images of death are relatively rare.
Part of a special journal issue dedicated to strategies for societal renewal in Haiti., Fonkoze, "the bank the poor can call their own," is a bank that provides more than just loans. It also sees access to reasonably priced savings, remittance transfer, and currency conversion as a right of even the poorest. This article tells the story of how -- after the devastation of the 2010 earthquake -- Fonkoze found itself positioned to serve Haiti's rural population before other banks were back on their feet.
Part of a special journal issue focusing on the role of the U.S. Foreign Service in Haiti., Offers 21 stories describing American Foreign Service Association experiences in disaster relief in Haiti.
This paper begins by reviewing briefly at historical changes in the employment of geospatial technologies in major devastating disasters, including the Sichuan and Haiti earthquakes. It goes on to assess changes in the available dataset type and in geospatial disaster responders, as well as the impact of geospatial technological changes on disaster relief effort. Finally, the paper discusses lessons learned from recent responses and offers some thoughts for future development.
The Navy and Department of Defense are working with the academic and crisis-response communities in a series of exercises to explore and experiment with new coordinated information-sharing tools, techniques and procedures based on social science research on social media. The response to the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti demonstrated the value of information sharing during a disaster, whether it be in real time via Twitter, standard messaging service text messaging or in imagery posted on YouTube, Flickr or Facebook.
This paper provides a cross-cultural analysis of the experiences of Oxfam GB in supporting urban community-based disaster risk reduction in Haiti, Guyana and the Dominican Republic. The paper focuses on the efforts of Oxfam GB and its local partners to overcome the determining influence of local governance on who benefits from interventions, and the longevity of positive outcomes.
A benefit-cost analysis was performed on varying levels of standard buildings codes for Haiti and Puerto Rico. It was found that in the two areas studied, the expected loss of life was reduced the most by use of high seismic building code levels, but lower levels of seismic building code were more cost-effective when considering only building damages and the costs for code implementation.
The privatized, top-down approach to aid delivery in the camps for displaced Haitians has made possible all manner of abuse and coercion. Haitian activists are responding by demanding their human rights, even as they challenge dominant conceptions of those rights.
Recent mass death incidents in Japan and Haiti have again focused attention on the challenge of dealing with large numbers of dead. Focusing on mass death incidents involving large numbers of Canadian victims, including the Titanic, Halifax explosion, Air India bombing and the 2004 Tsunami, the paper researches incidents dating back to the beginning of the 20th Century. By examining each stage of the process including initial response, identification, funerals, communication, religious services and inquests, the paper identifies key changes in the way that mass death incidents are handled.
Part of a special journal issue dedicated to strategies for societal renewal in Haiti., Provides an account of the efforts by a humanitarian organization's efforts ot reestablish connectivity for other humanitarian organizations working in Haiti after the recent devastating earthquake. It outlines its plans for continued efforts to bring better infrastructure to the rest of the country, accelerate disaster preparedness efforts, improve the quality of education and health-care training and delivery, enable business development, and improve accountability and transparency for local government and organization.
When the earthquake of 7.0 on the Richter scale struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, the forcibly displaced on and off the island were the object of emergency planning, but so too were the host populations in Haiti and the neighbouring Dominican Republic. This article seeks to examine the emergency response to the earthquake and ongoing challenges through the lens of critical mobilities, with special reference to forced migration island-wide. Who (men, women, boys and girls) is able to move, how, where, for how long and through which networks? What is the legal framework, if any, governing these movements? Who wants visibility and who prefers to move 'incognito', in the context, for example, of ambiguous migration policies in the Dominican Republic towards impoverished Haitian immigrants?
