Haiti Earthquake Research Articles

Concept of emergency clean water infrastructure provision for minimizing potential impact of earthquake

Surabaya and Waru Fault lines are crossing Surabaya, causing potential earthquake of 6.0-6.9 RS. The potential Earthquake could make significant impact including a damage to clean water infrastructure which can cause in increased casualties. In 2010 Haiti Earthquake, cholera epidemic has increased the number of fatalities. Therefore, providing emergency clean water infrastructure can significantly reduce the impact of earthquake. Using content analysis and triangulation method, this research produces 33 criteria. Those criteria are set to propose a concept for providing emergency clean water infrastructure following the stages of disaster risk management. The concept consists of relevant actions to meet the criteria and indicator. During mitigation, the concept focus on mapping, inventory, and optimizing relevant program. In preparedness, the concept focus on ensuring the amount, condition, and distribution of supporting equipment for providing emergency clean water infrastructure. In emergency response, the concept focus on protecting the water sources, improving coordination in treatment and distribution process, and providing access for vulnerable group. In recovery, the concept focus on coordination between the responsible institution and affected community in decision making process.

A Simple Method to Map Groundwater Depth and Water Quality for Leogane, Haiti and Elsewhere

In the aftermath of the January 2010 Haiti Earthquake, the streets of downtown Leogane were paved to mitigate waterborne disease using humanitarian relief funds. After paving, many of the shallow water wells in Leogane dried up. It was believed that the new pavement disrupted groundwater recharge and negatively impacted the wells. Therefore, a project was performed to assess groundwater conditions in a cost-effective manner using a rapid, inexpensive, non-intrusive geophysical approach. The scope of the project included 1) surveying the new pavement system, 2) surveying water wells in Leogane, 3) testing the well water for coliforms, 4) performing geophysical DC resistivity testing to map groundwater depth and 5) developing a groundwater map to assess the impact of the pavement on the water table. As a result of this project, it could not be concluded that the new pavement was a factor in the groundwater fluctuations observed in the water wells in Leogane. It is more likely that some of the drop in the water table was due to the earthquake itself and some of it was caused by seasonal fluctuations in the water table. It was also observed that all the water wells that extract water from shallow (less than 6 m deep) aquifers in Leogane contain coliforms due to their proximity to household latrines, although a second deeper aquifer was identified and found to be coliform-free. With respect to broader impact, this methodology represents a relatively simple approach to mapping groundwater and assessing water quality that can be easily applied to other communities in the developing world to guide their efforts to develop and manage groundwater.

A Multi-Feature Fusion Using Deep Transfer Learning for Earthquake Building Damage Detection

With the recent tremendous improvements in the spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions of remote sensing imaging systems, there has been a dramatic increase in their applications. Amongst different applications of very high-resolution remote sensing images, damage detection for rapid emergency response is one of the most challenging ones. Recently, deep learning frameworks have enhanced the performance of earthquake damage detection by automatic extraction of strong deep features. However, most of the existing studies in this area focus on using nadir satellite images or orthophotos which limits the available data sources. The objective of this study is to present a multi-modal integrated structure to combine orthophoto and off-nadir images for earthquake building damage detection. In this context, a multi-feature fusion method based on deep transfer learning is presented, which contains four different steps, namely pre-processing, deep feature extraction, deep feature fusion, and transfer learning. To validate the presented framework, two comparative experiments are conducted on the 2010 Haiti earthquake, using pre- and post-event off-nadir satellite images, which were collected by WorldView-2 (WV-2) satellite platform as well as a post-event airborne orthophoto. The results demonstrate considerable advantages in identifying damaged and non-damaged buildings with over 83% for the overall accuracy.

The 2010 Haiti earthquake revisited: An acoustic intensity map from remote atmospheric infrasound observations

In the days following the January 12, 2010 Mw 7 Haiti earthquake the shaking intensity near the epicenter was overestimated and the spatial extent of the potentially damaging shaking was underestimated. This was due to the lack of seismometers in the near-source region at the time of the earthquake. Besides seismic waves, earthquakes generate infrasound, i.e., inaudible acoustic waves in the atmosphere. Here we show that infrasound signals, detected at distant ground-based stations, can be used to generate a map of the acoustic intensity, which is proportional to the shaking intensity. This is demonstrated with infrasound from the 2010 Haiti earthquake detected in Bermuda, over 1700 km away. Wavefront parameters are retrieved in a beamforming process and are backprojected to map the measured acoustic intensity to the source region. The backprojection process accounts for horizontal advection effects due to winds and inherent uncertainties with regard to the time of detection and the back azimuth resolution. Furthermore, we resolve the ground motion polarity in the epicentral region and use synthetics generated by an extended infrasound source model to support this result. Infrasound measurements are conducted globally for the verification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and although the network was designed to provide global coverage for nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, it is shown in this paper that there is also global coverage for the estimation of acoustic shaking intensity. In this study, we lay the groundwork that can potentially make infrasound-based ShakeMaps a useful tool alongside conventional ShakeMaps and a valuable tool for earthquake disaster mitigation in sparsely monitored regions.

Bounding and Binding: Trajectories of Community-Organization Emergence Following a Major Disruption

An important and underexamined topic in the growing literature on community-embedded organizing concerns situations in which dramatic shifts in the environment require the time-sensitive re-establishment of both communities and organizations to address urgent needs. We conduct a qualitative study of emergent community-organization trajectories in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake and explore differences in the processes and interactions between emerging organizations and communities. Despite all organizations in our data facing the same external shock, they differed in how they interpreted the nature of crisis-induced voids, established boundaries to build and organize communities, and created connections to bind themselves to their communities. We compare and contrast these differences to reveal three trajectories of community-organization emergence, explain why these trajectories initially formed in the ways they did, and identify unique mechanisms that led to these trajectories’ divergence. Our findings contribute to the literature on community-embedded organizing by demonstrating how organizations re-establish communities while simultaneously emerging within those communities.

Haiti’s cholera epidemic: will it return in 2021?

Cholera is a scourge that has plagued humanity from early times; no era was exempt at different times in history, and the mere mention of cholera in past generations often caused panic among susceptible populations. Now with the recent 7.2 magnitude in Haiti, the question re- emerges: can Haiti’s cholera epidemic return considering the extensive earthquake damage that has recently occurred? Haiti is prone to earthquakes, due to its location along a fault line, and over the centuries has encountered numerous earthquakes, some including the 2010 and 2021 earthquakes of 7.0 or greater magnitude. Cholera has been around for centuries, and in the last century has caused at least 7 devastating global outbreaks each claiming thousands of innocent human lives. Cholera infects 1.3 to 4 million people around the world annually with over 20,000 deaths per year according to the World Health Organization (WHO) statistics. Cholera is a microbial disease of multicausal origin and fecal-oral transmission, where various biological, environmental, social, political and cultural factors often intervene, thereby presenting complex solutions for what often becomes a public health issue in the broader community. Over 819,000 Haitians became ill with cholera during the years following the 2010 earthquake, with nearly 10,000 deaths reported as a result of one of Haiti’s main waterways accidently becoming contaminated with the highly infectious cholera organism. Considering the severe damages now being reported from the August – 2021 earthquake followed by a severe weather outlook, the potential for a re-emergence of the cholera epidemic may now become a serious public health threat to the island Nation, including the potential risks to other nearby Island nations in the Caribbean and beyond should infected carriers relocate to non-earthquake prone localities. Implementation of effective hygiene measures, including timely medical monitoring and strategic intervention where indicated will be essential to prevent a resurgence of cholera or other public health issues in the coming weeks and months aftermath of the destruction of the roads, structures and public health resources resulting from the recent earthquake in Haiti.

Portability and Acceleration of Deep Learning Inferences to Detect Rapid Earthquake Damage From VHR Remote Sensing Images Using Intel OpenVINO Toolkit

Accurate and effective rapid detection in remote sensing images plays an extremely important role in natural disasters, landslides, flooding problems, and military defense. Specially in earthquake damage detection, time critical tasks, such as performing the damage assessment or providing immediate delivery of relief assistance, require responses for swift decisions. To minimize response time, this article proposes the portability and acceleration of the inferences process on a deep convolution neural network model to detect rapid earthquake damage on very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing data using the Intel OpenVINO toolkit. This model, based on a previous work, has been optimized for high performance computing techniques to minimize processing times. Along with the immediate responses, the correctness of the result is also very crucial parameter for such type of applications. For analysis and performance, we use the GeoEye-1 VHR disaster images of the Haiti earthquake occurred in year 2010. Experimental results show that the optimized model provides good accuracy for damage detection with significant execution speed on CPU+GPU using mixed precision technique compared to other previous work. Moreover, OpenVINO toolkit presents satisfactory performance in the inference stage compared to other toolkits, such as TensorFlow serving, using asynchronous inference mode executed on an Intel Xeon processor and Intel Movidius NCS as coprocessor.

Are the 2021 and 2010 Haiti earthquakes part of a progressive sequence?

Are the 2021 and 2010 Haiti earthquakes part of a progressive sequence?

My Day with the Panye by Tami Charles

Reviewed by: My Day with the Panye by Tami Charles Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Charles, Tami My Day with the Panye; illus. by Sara Palacios. Candlewick, 2021 [40p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780763697495 $17.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R 4–7 yrs It’s young Fallon’s turn to accompany Manman to the market in Port-au-Prince, and she’s desperate to carry the panye atop her head, but she’s not able to keep her balance and the basket crashes to the floor. Manman is gentle, though, taking up the task, and as they walk through their city, she points to the beauty of their island and the fortitude of their neighbors and explains that carrying the panye is as much an act of love as it is a skill. The text has a rhythmic vibrancy, rich with imagery: “We walk past colorful walls—swirls of blue like a cloudless sky; green and red like the coffee plants sprouting at our feet.” The vivid narrative is matched by the effervescent digital art, packed to the brim with texture and bold colors and perfectly capturing the milieu of the Haitian city, from the “tap-tap bus” that chugs by, to the graffiti that celebrates Haitian culture, to the joyful chaos of the market. Manman’s mention of the 2010 Haiti earthquake may need to be given some adult context, but plenty of kids will relate to Fallon’s yearning to prove her mettle by carrying the basket and they’ll appreciate Manman’s patience and encouragement. Readers who enjoyed the neighborhood jaunt in Quintero’s My Papi Has a Motorcycle (BCCB 5/19) will want to amble along with Fallon and Manman. An author’s note gives more background. Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Management Of Chronic Noncommunicable Diseases After Natural Disasters In The Caribbean: A Scoping Review.

Extreme weather events in the Caribbean region are becoming increasingly severe because of climate change. The region also has high rates of poorly controlled chronic noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), which were responsible for at least 30percent of deaths after two recent hurricanes. We conducted a scoping review of literature published between 1974 and 2020 to understand the burden and management of chronic NCDs in the Caribbean after natural disasters. Of the twenty-nine articles included in this review, most described experiences related to Hurricanes Dorian (2019) and Irma and Maria (2017) and the Haiti earthquake (2010). Challenges included access to medication, acute care services, and appropriate food, as well as communication difficulties and reliance on ad hoc volunteers and outside aid. Mitigating these challenges requires different approaches, including makeshift points of medication dispensing, disease surveillance systems, and chronic disease self-management education programs. Evidence is needed to inform policies to build resilient health systems and integrate NCD management into regional and national disaster preparedness and response plans.

(Re)Learning to Live Together in 2020

Ten years ago, the world was quite a different place with the devastation of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti, the exuberance of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the release of the first iPad, the launch of Instagram, and the beginning of Arab Spring. Fast forward to 2020 and not only is it the 10th anniversary of the Journal of International Students, but the world is facing unprecedented times with a global pandemic that has illustrated the interconnectedness of humankind like never before. We have all been reminded of the power of human connection as we experience isolation, confinement, social distancing, and even fear. We have witnessed powerful images of front-line workers giving their all, and neighbors in cities and towns across the world connecting from balconies and through windowpanes. These images have reminded us how much our lives depend on those around us, and how important it is that we renew our efforts in learning how to live together.

Identification of Damaged Building Regions From High- Resolution Images Using Superpixel-Based Gradient and Autocorrelation Analysis

An efficient and accurate identification of damaged buildings after earthquakes is critical for ensuring a quick response and efficient rescue operations. Considering the time pressure during disaster emergency response and the convenience of practical application, a new approach for identifying areas with damaged buildings is proposed in this study. The approach is validated on high–resolution images from areas impacted by the Haiti earthquake. The approach consists of the following steps. (i), the simple linear iterative clustering method is improved to segment the images into high-quality superpixels by combining both color and texture information; (ii) the characteristics of the damage in the area within the cluster and the difference between pre- and post-earthquake images are obtained at superpixel level using the Sobel gradient; and (iii) local indicators from the spatial association analysis are used to extract the result of the gradient clustering using the synthetic- damage index calculated by an improved relief algorithm; and (iv) vegetation and shadows are masked out to identify the damaged buildings. This framework achieved an overall accuracy of ∼90% in terms of visual interpretation, with precision and recall of ∼85% and ∼90%, respectively. Inaccuracies mainly occur around the boundaries of the damaged building regions. It is evaluated that the proposed framework is more convenient compared to other supervised and unsupervised methods. The successful application in different scenes demonstrates that the proposed framework has the ability to rapidly and accurately identify regions with damaged buildings, which is beneficial for post-disaster emergency assessment.

COVID 19 and Entrepreneurship: Time to Pivot?

Abstract I thank JMS for this invitation to explore how COVID 19, and its aftermath, leads us to question some of the fundamental assumptions of entrepreneurship research In this dialogue, I highlight five fundamental assumptions of the field that are challenged by COVID 19 that may require a research pivot, i e , that may require a change in research direction on specific topics

The Housing Market Value Chain: An Integrated Approach for Mitigating Risk in Informal Residential Construction in Haiti

Access to dignified housing represents a critical challenge for many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Technical and economic constraints frequently lead homeowners in these countries toward incrementally-constructed homes, which are often proven deadly when exposed to seismic or meteorological hazards. This paper offers a holistic analysis of the informal residential construction industry contextualized in Léogâne, Haiti, the effective epicenter of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and offers an implementation framework geared towards integrating the housing delivery process to accommodate more resilient typologies. First, the concept of the housing ecosystem is introduced, and a thorough analysis of the technical, economic, and political factors that constrain this ecosystem in Haiti is presented. The defining elements of the resulting residential construction industry are then discussed: An informal blend of Design-Build and Master Builder methods of project delivery for incrementally-constructed (and largely masonry) permanent homes. The housing ecosystem is then redefined as a seven-step housing market value chain, and interventions to further strengthen and integrate this value chain are presented for each of the seven steps. Interventions are grounded in analogous contexts and refactored specifically for the Haitian case study scenario through extensive co-creation with stakeholders in Haiti. Particular focus is given to the Léogâne Community Building Fund, a concept designed to democratize housing finance for low to middle-income groups. When implemented in an integrated fashion, risks across this housing market value chain are effectively mitigated to sustainably deliver dignified housing through a market-based approach suitable for Haiti and extensible to other LMICs.

Mental Health Among Children Older than 10Years Exposed to the Haiti 2010 Earthquake: a Critical Review.

There is evidence that the exposure to a major natural disaster such as the 2010 earthquake in Haiti may have devastating short- and long-term effects on children's mental health and overall development. This review summarizes what has been reported in the past 3years (2017-2020) regarding emotional, psychological, and behavioral effects of exposure to this particular earthquake on children 10years and older. Twenty-six articles were screened, of which twenty-one were selected for final analysis. The main themes addressed in the literature over the 3years concerned prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, determinants of resilience factors, prevalence of sexual violence as well as prenatal exposure, and subsequent autism behaviors/symptoms. The majority of the findings analyzed in this review on mental health in young Haitian survivors of the 2010 earthquake came from cross-sectional studies conducted in West region of Haiti, spefically Port-au-Prince. There was a paucity of longitudinal and translational data available. The results of this critical review can be used to inform disaster preparedness programs with the aim of protecting children's development and mental health, which are much needed on this disaster-prone island.

"We Live on Hope...": Ethical Considerations of Humanitarian Use of Drones in Post-Disaster Nepal

As international humanitarian assistance from governments and private donors continued to increase in recent years, the pace of growth, however, has slowed down [1]. For instance, in 2018, while USd17.0 billion out of USd28.1 billion funding was committed to UN-coordinated appeals, there was still a funding shortfall of USd11.1 billion, with only 61% of requirements met [1]. Against this backdrop, international organizations are in - creasingly implementing innovative solutions to respond the needs of affected communities [2], [3]. Many of these solutions involve the use of digital technologies, such as geographic information systems (GIS), robotics, spatial decision support systems, and unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones [4]. Although drones are not the first use of robotics in commercial and industrial settings, the humanitarian use of drones represents the first wave of robotics applied in the aid sector, and is representative of emerging technologies being used for humanitarian purposes [5]. Examples of successful drone use in this setting include the 2010 Haiti earthquake (damage inspection), 2012 Hurricane Sandy in the U.S.A. (epidemic prevention), 2013 Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines (rescue logistics), the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa (medical equipment delivery), and the 2015 Nepal earthquake - the site of this case study - when Nepal was stricken by one of the most devastating natural disasters in history, leaving the country with heavy burdens of immediate emergency relief and long-term postdisaster reconstruction [6]-[8].

Crisis Leadership-From the Haiti Earthquake to the COVID Pandemic.

Crisis Leadership-From the Haiti Earthquake to the COVID Pandemic.

Deep submarine landslide contribution to the 2010 Haiti earthquake tsunami

Abstract. The devastating Mw 7.1 Haiti earthquake in 2010 was accompanied by local tsunamis that caused fatalities and damage to coastal infrastructure. Some were triggered by slope failures of river deltas in the close vicinity of the epicenter, while others, 30 to 50 km to the north across the Bay of Gonâve, are well explained by the reverse component of coseismic ground motion that accompanied this mostly strike-slip event. However, observations of run-up heights up to 2 m along the southern coast of the island at distances up to 100 km from the epicenter, as well as tide gauge and DART buoy records at distances up to 600 km from the epicenter, have not yet received an explanation. Here we demonstrate that these observations require a secondary source, most likely a submarine landslide. We identify a landslide scar 30 km from the epicenter off the southern coast of Haiti at a depth of 3500 m, where ground acceleration would have been sufficient to trigger slope failure in soft sediments. This candidate source, 2 km3 in volume, matches observations remarkably well assuming that the sediment collapse obeys a viscous flow with an initial apparent viscosity of 2×105 Pa s. Although that particular source cannot be proven to have been activated in 2010, our results add to a line of evidence that earthquake-triggered submarine landslides can cause significant tsunamis in areas of strike-slip tectonic regime.

Improved Rapid Assessment of Earthquake Hazard Safety of Structures via Artificial Neural Networks

The vulnerability of structures mainly depends on the structural resistance system of buildings to earthquake. It is unlikely that all existing buildings can be inspected in detail. Therefore, rapid methods for evaluating buildings have been developed over the last decades. This paper investigates the earthquake susceptibility through the combination of buildings’ geometrical attributes that affect the vulnerability of building and can be used to obtain an optimal prediction of the damage state of reinforced concrete (RC) buildings using artificial neural networks (ANNs). In this regard, a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) network has been trained and optimized using a database of 145 damaged buildings from the Haiti earthquake. The results demonstrate the practicability and effectiveness of the selected ANNs approach to classify actual structural damage that can be used as a preliminary assessment procedure to recognize vulnerable buildings.

Ethical Considerations for Postdisaster Fieldwork and Data Collection in the Caribbean

The postdisaster environment presents a multitude of ethical and logistical challenges for researchers interested in gathering timely and unpreserved data. Due to the unavailability of secondary data in the immediate aftermath of disasters, postdisaster researchers have become dependent on qualitative methods that involve engaging with disaster survivors as research participants. This is a common interaction in the Caribbean due to the region’s high occurrence of disasters and human participant engagement by external researchers during the postdisaster phase. However, due to escalating unethical practices since the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Caribbean nations are beginning the process of censuring unapproved postdisaster fieldwork by external researchers. In this study, the authors approach these ethical considerations through a justice lens to propose a checklist for postdisaster researchers interested in ethical fieldwork and justice for their research participants. Correspondence with Caribbean emergency managers confirms the negative perception toward external researchers and the trend of enacting protocols that stop unvetted community access following disasters. However, these local agencies acknowledge the benefits of ethical postdisaster research and are open to serving as research coordinating centers. Such coordinating centers would harness local capabilities and lower the likelihood of the duplication of research topics and the overburdening of survivors as research participants.