Full Moon Over Haiti and Chile
A remarkable aspect of the recent Haitian and Chilean earthquakes was the swift mobilization of military force to protect property instead of persons. In some long-ago world, maybe one of my imaginings, the well-muscled men in camouflage would have offered a hand instead of a gun. Watchers of New Orleans, Haiti, and Chile might well suspect that they are merely one disaster away from the full violence of their states.
“The earth had never trembled here, in this soft point of land that leans forward toward the sea: the city is build on spongy soil, that of the coral plain; the region had never known volcanoes nor vents, nor columns of smoke, nor geysers, nor solfataras....”
Jose Marti, from the essay "
The Earthquake at Charleston"
published in The Nation,
September 10, 1886
Dady Chery, Axis of Logic
A remarkable aspect of the recent Haitian and Chilean earthquakes was the swift mobilization of military force to protect property instead of persons. In some long-ago world, maybe one of my imaginings, the well-muscled men in camouflage would have offered a hand instead of a gun. Watchers of New Orleans, Haiti, and Chile might well suspect that they are merely one disaster away from the full violence of their states.
Perhaps the fear of these thoughts has transformed genuine expressions of empathy to academic discussions of the perceived contrasts between Haiti and Chile. Citizens of both countries are suffering, not from a lack of infrastructure but an abundance of bad luck. In Haiti, the earthquake happened before five in the afternoon while many schools, businesses, and government buildings were populated. The highest concentrations of casualties occurred under such structures. The epicenter of the Haitian quake coincided with the sizeable city of Leogane and was only a short hop (15 miles) from the capital city of Port-au-Prince. The earthquake in Haiti happened inland and was quite shallow. The one in Chile occurred at sea and was nearly three times deeper, but it generated enough force to accelerate the earth’s rotation permanently by one millionth of a second. About one half of the Haitian population suffered earthquake intensities that were “Violent” to “Severe”, with the collapse of many buildings. The Chilean victims, who were farther from the epicenter of their earthquake, endured intensities that were “Severe” to “Very Strong”, but these were accompanied by waves of murderous tsunamis.
