By CHIP website editors, Jan 11, 2015
Readers of the news coverage of the fifth anniversary of Haiti's earthquake once again confront conflicting, exaggerated and confusing figures on the human and physical damage caused by the earthquake. The Miami Herald reports "300,000" people died. And concerning housing, the Herald says, "Five years after the January 2010 earthquake, tens of thousands of Haitians are still living in tent cities. But the number is far fewer than the 1.5 million displaced by the tragedy."
CBC News says the earthquake "killed more than 230,000 and displaced 1.5 million people". Grégoire Goodstein, Head of Mission for the International Organisation for Migration, told Radio Canada (CBC French service) last week, "There were 1.5 million people in 1,555 camps in June 2010. Today, we have 150 camps with 79,000 people. That's a 94 per cent reduction. I think that's a good result." (View a five-minute interview with Gregoire here.)
Here are a few figures which are based on the only rigorous study of the earthquake's deadly destruction, the USAID-funded Building Assessment and Rubble Removal (BARR) Survey. The BARR Survey was never published by USAID but released in May 2011.
BARR reported on the architectural survey of Port au Prince following the earthquake which identified in great detail the damage to the vast majority of buildings in the city. The architectural survey was led by Miyamota International, in collaboration with Haiti's Ministry of Public Works, Transport, Communication, UN‘s Office for Project Services, and the Pan American Development Foundation. Miyamota International trained 270 Haitian engineers in building assessment techniques. The engineers evaluated and then tagged buildings using a color coded system: green equaled 'safe', yellow meant 'inhabit after repairs', and red meant 'unsafe for occupancy'. Over the period of February 2010 to January 2011 the engineers evaluated 382,256 buildings in Port-au-Prince buildings. They marked 205,539 green (54%), 99,043 yellow (26%) and 77,674 red (20%).
BARR also concluded that the number of deaths from the earthquake were between 46,000 and 86,000. The death totals were extrapolated from the study's detailed surveys in neighbourhoods throughout the city.
The number of people who went to earthquake survivor camps immediately following the earthquake was reported by international agencies as 1.5 million. Not all of these people had lost their homes. Most went to camps because they feared another earthquake. Other major reasons were the lack of security in neighbourhoods, no services to those homes that survived, and neighbourhoods blocked by rubble. Many people maintained tents in the camps in the months after the earthquake even after they returned home or moved elsewhere because very little official aid was getting into neighbourhoods; it was being directed to camps.