Massive Earthquake Strikes Haiti

[Ocklawaha]

Horribe news in the most impoverished nation in the hemisphere...
GOOGLE.COM  - EARTHQUAKE IN HAITI!!!!!! WAS FELT IN JAMACIA!!! 7.0 Magnitude!!! http://goo.gl/JQ5w http://goo.gl/gc7N

http://tickerforum.org/cgi-ticker/akcs-www?post=124419

By JOSé DE CóRDOBA and DAVID LUHNOW

A powerful earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale shook Haiti on Tuesday, causing several buildings to collapse in the Western hemisphere's poorest nation and leading to an unknown number of fatalities, officials and witnesses said.

The earthquake was centered just 10 miles southwest of the crowded and impoverished capital of Port-au-Prince. Making matters worse, the earthquake was relatively shallow at a depth of five miles, the U.S. Geological Survey said. Shallow earthquakes can cause more damage.

"I think it's really a catastrophe of major proportions," Haiti's ambassador to the U.S., Raymond Alcide Joseph, told CNN.

Raphaelle Chenet, the administrator of Mercy and Sharing, a charity that takes care of 109 orphans, said she saw about ten dead bodies in the street after the quake struck.

"I saw dead bodies, people are screaming, they are on the street panicking, people are hurt," she told The Wall Street Journal. "There are a lot of wounded, broken heads, broken arms."

In Port-au-Prince, many houses built on steep ravines have collapsed, Ms. Chenet said. She said from her house she had heard a couple of explosions, which she believed to be gas explosions. The orphans in the two institutions run by Mercy and Sharing weren't hurt, although an orphanage worker suffered a broken leg, she said.

President Barack Obama said his thoughts and prayers were with the people of Haiti, and U.S. officials said they would consider immediate humanitarian aid.

An Associated Press videographer saw the collapsed wreckage of a hospital in Petionville, near Port-au-Prince. Reuters news agency cited a witness saying several buildings had crumbled in the capital and that there were dead and injured trapped in the rubble.

At least 1.8 million people live within the area where the earthquake had its highest intensity, John Bellini, a geophysicist at the USGS, told The Wall Street Journal. "With a strong and shallow earthquake like this in such a populated area, it could really cause substantial damage," he said.

The quake was the most powerful to hit Haiti since at least 1770, according to USGS records, Mr. Bellini added. "This isn't normally an earthquake-prone area," he said.

Within minutes of the original tremor, two aftershocks rolled through the area, measuring 5.9 and 5.5 on the Richter scale.

Eight in ten Haitians live in poverty, according to the CIA World Factbook. The Caribbean nation was hit hard by a series of hurricanes in the past few years, adding to the country's misery.

Rep. Eliot Engel (D., N.Y.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Western Hemisphere subcommittee, said: "This is the worst possible time for a natural disaster in Haiti, a country which is still recovering from the devastating storms of just over a year ago."

Write to José de Córdoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com and David Luhnow at david.luhnow@wsj.com

MetroJacksonville extends our hopes and prayers go out to our Haitian brothers and sisters, if any of you would like to help here are a couple of places to start:

http://www.directrelief.org/EmergencyResponse/2010/EarthquakeHaiti.aspx?gclid=CNvYkISaoJ8CFRaenAodryXDJQ

http://donate.worldvision.org/OA_HTML/xxwv2ibeCCtpItmDspRte.jsp?item=1328102&cmp=KNC-113655119&section=&go=item&xxwvCampaign=113655119


OCKLAWAHA

[Ocklawaha]

January 12, 2010
Massive earthquake in Hati

Many Casualties

    PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti â€" The largest earthquake ever recorded in the area rocked Haiti on Tuesday, collapsing a hospital where people screamed for help and damaging other buildings. An aid official described "total disaster and chaos."

    Communications were widely disrupted, making it impossible to get a clear picture of damage as powerful aftershocks shook a desperately poor country where many buildings are flimsy. Electricity was out in some places.

    Karel Zelenka, a Catholic Relief Services representative in the capital of Port-au-Prince, told U.S. colleagues before phone service failed that "there must be thousands of people dead," according to a spokeswoman for the aid group, Sara Fajardo.

    "He reported that it was just total disaster and chaos, that there were clouds of dust surrounding Port-au-Prince," Fajardo said from the group's offices in Maryland.

    The earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.0 and was centered about 10 miles (15 kilometers) west of Port-au-Prince, the U.S. Geological Survey said. It had a depth of 5 miles (8 kilometers). It was the largest quake recorded in the area and the first major one since a magnitude-6.7 temblor in 1984, USGS analyst Dale Grant said.

OCKLAWAHA

[Bostech]

I hate earthquakes,especially in middle of night on cold day.

[stjr]

Sad.  Our prayers for these poor people.  Add to the disasters below their disastrous political leadership.  How lucky we are, with all the warts we have, to live as we do where we do.

P.S. Ock, you may wish to fix the county's spelling in your subject banner for this thread.  "Haiti", not "Hati".

P.S.S. If this could happen in Haiti, is Florida immune from such an incident?

(CNN)...Because of the earthquake's proximity to the capital, and because the city is densely populated and has poorly constructed housing, "it could cause significant casualties," said Jian Lin, a senior geologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

Haiti's government is backed by a U.N. peacekeeping mission established after the ouster of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. Efforts to contact the U.N. mission were unsuccessful Tuesday evening, but former President Clinton -- now the U.N. special envoy for Haiti -- said the world body was "committed to do whatever we can to assist the people of Haiti in their relief, rebuilding and recovery efforts."

The disaster is the latest to befall Haiti, which has a population of about 9 million people and is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Hurricane Gordon killed more than 1,000 people in 1994, while Hurricane Georges killed more than 400 and destroyed the majority of the country's crops in 1998.

In 2004, heavy rains from Hurricane Jeanne -- which passed north of the country -- caused landslides and flooding that killed more than 3,000 people, mostly in the northwestern city of Gonaives. Gonaives was hit heavily again in 2008, when four tropical systems passed through.

A tsunami watch for Haiti, the Dominican Republic and parts of Cuba following the earthquake has been canceled, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said.

Eighty percent of Haiti's population lives under the poverty line, according to the CIA World Factbook.

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/01/12/haiti.earthquake/?imw=Y

[Ocklawaha]

First Photo, Via Twitter Pix, http://jacksonvilletransit.blogspot.com/

http://www.youtube.com/v/iESmmPeHRiU&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x402061&color2=0x9461ca

http://www.youtube.com/v/Ca1eW4jXox8&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x402061&color2=0x9461ca

2010 January 13 01:05:49 UTC

Versión en Español

   * Details
   * Summary
   * Maps
   * Scientific & Technical


Earthquake Details
Magnitude   4.6
Date-Time   

   * Wednesday, January 13, 2010 at 01:05:49 UTC
   * Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 08:05:49 PM at epicenter
   * Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location   18.537°N, 72.666°W
Depth   10 km (6.2 miles) set by location program
Region   HAITI REGION
Distances   35 km (20 miles) W of PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti
120 km (75 miles) ENE of Les Cayes, Haiti
145 km (90 miles) SSW of Cap-Haitien, Haiti
1110 km (690 miles) SE of Miami, Florida
Location Uncertainty   horizontal +/- 9.2 km (5.7 miles); depth fixed by location program
Parameters   NST= 29, Nph= 29, Dmin=153.5 km, Rmss=1.41 sec, Gp= 83°,
M-type=body wave magnitude (Mb), Version=7
Source   

   * USGS NEIC (WDCS-D)

Event ID   us2010rkag

   * This event has been reviewed by a seismologist.
   * Did you feel it? Report shaking and damage at your location. You can also view a map displaying accumulated data from your report and others.

Earthquake Summary
Small globe showing earthquakeSmall map showing earthquake

Earthquake Information for Caribbean
Earthquake Maps

   * Earthquake Location
     Earthquake Location
   * Earthquake Location Maps
     Location Maps
   * Did You Feel It?
     Did You Feel It? Tell Us
   * Historical Seismicity
     Historical Seismicity
   * Seismic Hazard Map
     Seismic Hazard Map
   * EQ Density Map
     EQ Density Map
   * Google Map
     Google Map
   * Google Earth KML
     Google Earth KML
     (Requires Google Earth)

Scientific & Technical Information

   * Historic Moment Tensor Solutions
   * Phase Data
   * Theoretical P-Wave Travel Times

   * Preliminary Earthquake Report
   * U.S. Geological Survey, National Earthquake Information Center:
     World Data Center for Seismology, Denver

OCKLAWAHA

[stjr]

January 12, 2010
Earthquakes common in Caribbean



This evening's devastating 7.0 earthquake in Haiti has been followed by a series of large aftershocks measuring more than 5.0 on the Richter scale. It was also preceded by  smaller quakes (2.9 to 3.4) in Puerto Rico, across the Mona Passage from the island Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic.

Although it is not as familiar as the Pacific's seismically and volcanically active "Ring of Fire," the Caribbean Islands also lie on an active fault system. Earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis are all facts of life in the islands, past and present.

The much-visited port of Charlotte Amalie, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, was the scene of a devastating tsunami in 1867 that sent a 20-foot wall of water surging in to the harbor. Large U.S. Naval ships were beached by the waves. Other Caribbean ports also felt the tsunami.

Another large quake (magnitude 7.5) in October 1918 struck Puerto Rico. It killed more than 100 people, caused widespread damage, and sent a tsunami as high as 20 feet ashore.

An earthquake in Jamaica in 1692 destroyed the port city of Kingston, and dropped it into the sea. More than 5,000 people died. Jamaicans felt the Tuesday evening quake in Haiti, too.

The most famous volcanic event in the Caribbean was the 1902 eruption of Mt. Pele, on theMonserrat ash flow French island of Martinique.  Now regarded as the deadliest volcanic eruprtion of the 20th century, it killed nearly all 30,000 residents of the capital, Saint-Pierre.

One of the two survivors lived because he was in a poorly ventilated jail cell.

On the island of Monserrat (right), the Soufriere Hills volcano has been in some state of eruption since 1995, when it destroyed the capital town of Plymouth. Two-thirds of the island's population was forced to leave.

http://weblogs.marylandweather.com/2010/01/earthquakes_common_in_caribbea.html

[Ocklawaha]

P.S. Ock, you may wish to fix the county's spelling in your subject banner for this thread.  "Haiti", not "Hati".

P.S.S. If this could happen in Haiti, is Florida immune from such an incident?

PS? Nice catch stjr, guess I was copying from the Twitter which was spelling it that way! Oh well, bad spelirs luv kompanie. LOL

PSS? Absolutely NOT! One of the more serious quakes in the east coasts recorded history was centered in Charleston on a fault that runs roughly North - South, from Charleston to the north edge of Jacksonville... And that is just the part we know of. In 1884(?) it nearly leveled Charleston, and dumped shelves, books, cleared cupboards, broke windows and set the window-weights swinging within the walls scaring EVERYBODY to death IN JACKSONVILLE!

Perhaps the second largest quake on the East Coast was centered at what they THINK is the St. Augustine Fault, which runs from mid St. Johns County (?) northeast through St. Augustine and out to sea. The Spanish Government said it moved about 200 years ago, and knocked down coquina buildings throughout the town.

All can be seen in the National Earthquake Site.

OCKLAWAHA

[reednavy]

This just hasn't been their century so far. 2004 with then Tropical Storm Jeanne, 2008 with Fay, Gustav, Hanna, and Ike, and now this massive earthquake.

[Bostech]

God hates poor and weak,awards wealthy and strong.

[mtraininjax]

Bos - Even in death and bad times, you still find ways to be callous. How un-inspiring....

Show a bit of compassion and sympathy, these are human beings for goodness sake.

[reednavy]

He's a troll with nothing else better to do, what do you expect?

[Bostech]

Bos - Even in death and bad times, you still find ways to be callous. How un-inspiring....

Show a bit of compassion and sympathy, these are human beings for goodness sake.

What?
I said those poor people get screwed all the time,from hurricanes to diseases to earthquakes to poverty.
Which part is confusing you?

And listen to yourselves,people who support wars all over world where innocent die on regular basis,talk about being human.

By the way,I have been in earthquakes,war and being refugee....I know very well what these people are going thru.

[Lunican]

[reednavy]

And listen to yourselves,people who support wars all over world where innocent die on regular basis,talk about being human.

By the way,I have been in earthquakes,war and being refugee....I know very well what these people are going thru.

Can you point to where I said I supported the war?

Also, how are we supposed to believe you, when you post mindless dribble all the time?

[Bostech]

Believe me what?