Confluence of catastrophes

When it comes to natural disasters, Haiti seems to have a bull's-eye on its back. That's because of a killer combination of geography, poverty, social problems, slipshod building standards and bad luck, experts said Wednesday.

The list of catastrophes is mind-numbing: This week's devastating earthquake. Four tropical storms or hurricanes that killed about 800 people in 2008. Killer storms in 2005 and 2004. Floods in 2007, 2006, 2003 (twice) and 2002. And that's just the 21st century run-down.

"If you want to put the worst-case scenario together in the Western hemisphere (for disasters), it's Haiti," said Richard Olson, a professor at Florida International University who directs the Disaster Risk Reduction in the Americas project.

"There's a whole bunch of things working against Haiti. One is the hurricane track. The second is tectonics. Then you have the environmental degradation and the poverty," he said.

While the causes of individual disasters are natural, more than anything what makes Haiti a constant site of catastrophe is its heart-tugging social ills, disaster experts said. It starts with poverty, includes deforestation, unstable governments, poor building standards, low literacy rates and then comes back to poverty.

Every factor that disaster experts look for in terms of vulnerability is the worst it can be for Haiti, said Dennis Mileti, a seismic safety commissioner for California and author of the book "Disasters by Design."

Add to that the high population density in the capital, many of them migrants from the countryside who live in shantytowns scattered throughout Port-au-Prince.

"It doesn't get any worse," said Mileti, a retired University of Colorado professor. "I fear this may go down in history as the largest disaster ever, or pretty close to it."

The University of South Carolina's Susan Cutter, who maps out social vulnerability to disaster by county in the United States, said Haiti's poverty makes smaller disasters there worse.

"It's because they're so vulnerable, any event tips the balance," said Cutter, director of the school's Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute. "They don't have the kind of resiliency that other nations have. It doesn't take much to tip the balance."

A magnitude 7 earthquake is devastating wherever it hits, Cutter said. But it's even worse in a place like Haiti.

One problem is the poor quality of buildings, said Mark Merritt, a former Federal Emergency Management Agency official. Haiti doesn't have building codes, and even if it did, people who make on average $2 a day can't afford to build something that can withstand earthquakes and hurricanes, he said.

Then there's the deforestation that leads to mudslides and flooding, because Haiti leads the hemisphere in tree-clearing, Merritt and others said. That causes erosion that worsens flooding. The trees are cut down mostly for cooking because of the poverty, Merritt said.

Another problem is the inability to prepare for and cope with disaster, said Merritt, who last fall started work to help train Haitians to prepare for disasters, including creating emergency response teams in a country that has only a couple of fire stations.

It involved Haiti's small disaster bureau, the United Nations, Red Cross and other relief agencies and governments.

The training manuals still were being translated from English to Creole when the earthquake hit, he said.