I read yesterday that January 18 is the gloomiest day of the year.  So how did the third Monday in January come to be the worst day of the year?
Don Thibert with Everest College in Ontario says it's a calculation based on three factors. "Most of that surrounds Christmas bills starting to come in, broken New Year's resolutions, and of course the grey skies and weather we have in January."

I can honestly say that I absolutely hate January.  It is the ugliest month here in Oklahoma.  The twinkling  Christmas lights have come down, the trees stand like ugly barren sentinels void of life, the lawns, dry and withered,  testify that no life flourishes;  the foggy damp days put a pall on everything, often obscuring  the sun  , and Spring is still too far away to dare to hope.

The only holidays we have are ML King Day; and President's Day, which has become an afterthought thanks to ML King Day. Neither translates into much more than a day off work for a few people.

So, I usually spend my time in January reading and thinking. Though I have personal matters on my mind right now, my thoughts, as have others, have been with the Haiitian's terrible plight and how the world has reacted. 

It is hard to know just how much money has been raised to help the Haitians through this latest crisis. Suffice to say it is already in the trillions of dollars.

The United States government is donating $100 million, and people just using their cell phones donating $10 at a time to be charged to their bill have already donated $8 million dollars.

Celebrities like Madonna, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Sandra Bullock and many others are donating in chunks of a million at a time. George Clooney will be conducting a telethon with celebrities manning the phones this Friday on MTV.

Corporations such as Bank of America and several other broker firms also are making million dollar donations.

Countries and individuals around the world have also made contibutions.

It would seem that the trillions pouring in should be more than enough. However, in a country that still believes in voodoo, that does not have an adequate infastructure, and a woeful economy, possesses an unstable government, has one of the highest birthrates in the world with also one of the worst infant mortality rates; still has an adult illiteracy rate of almost 50%, has one of the highest incidences of AIDS in the world, does not possess clean drinking water with many homes also without electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing, simply rebuilding the city of Port-au-Prince barely scratches the surface.

Scientists have known for years that a devastating earthquake was likely to occur in Haiti. They just didn't know when. Although Tuesday’s devastation was wreaked by the most severe quake to hit Port-au-Prince since 1751, the island has been the victim of major seismic activity several times since.

The 7.0 quake deadly shock waves were equivalent to the force of 35 Hiroshima nuclear bombs and flattened Port-au-Prince

In 1946, a severe tremor in the region triggered a tsunami in the neighbouring Dominican Republic that killed almost 2,000 people. But what made the consequences of this week’s earthquake so much worse than previous ones was that it happened only six miles below the surface and only about fifteen miles from the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, where over a million people reside, most of them in shanties along the tree-stripped hills surrounding the city.

The problem in geological terms is that the Haitian half of the island of Hispaniola sits sandwiched between two fault lines on the divide between the North American tectonic plate and the Caribbean plate.

Seismologists estimate that the Caribbean plate is heading eastward at a rate estimated at between seven and 20mm a year – a seemingly miniscule amount but enough to produce tremendous pressures building up beneath the earth’s crust as these vast slabs grind against each other.

This movement has produced two fault lines, called strike-slip faults, to the north and south of Haiti: the Septentrional fault in the north and the Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden fault, which caused Tuesday’s disaster.

“It’s been locked solid for about the last 250 years,” said Roger Musson, a seismologist from the British Geological Survey.

“It’s been gathering stress all that time as the plates move past each other and it was really just a matter of time before it released all that energy. The question was going to be whether it would release it all at once or in a series of smaller earthquakes.”

That question was answered at 21.53 GMT on Tuesday when the quake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale sent its deadly shock waves – equivalent to the force of 35 Hiroshima nuclear bombs, according to scientists – through the streets and shantytowns of Port-au-Prince.

Although there have been more powerful quakes in Haiti’s history, the most recent measuring 7.2 in 1887, the fact that this one was comparatively shallow in the ground meant that its power was scarcely dissipated by the time it reached the surface.

Its closeness to Port-au-Prince also meant that extensive loss of life was inevitable in a city of more than a million souls, the vast bulk of them crowded together, often on hillsides, in a country where there is neither the money nor expertise to construct buildings capable of withstanding severe tremors.

Haiti’s plight has been made worse by the fact that only 3% of the island remains as forest. When Europeans first arrived there 500 years ago, they marvelled at the density of the trees, but subsequent deforestation, mainly to make charcoal, has left the terrain bare and vulnerable to landslides.

David Rothery, a planetary scientist at the UK’s Open University, said: “From the pictures I have seen, and from what I know of Haiti’s impoverished economy, I doubt if buildings there have been constructed with earthquake resistance in mind.

“They are at risk of further collapse caused by aftershocks, of which there have been several strong ones.

“The debris in the streets suggests that people would have been killed or injured by falling masonry if they tried to flee buildings while the ground was shaking, rather than sheltering under a table until motion had ceased.”

“It is many decades since a comparably strong quake has hit Haiti, and I wonder if the population was adequately aware of what they could do to protect themselves.”

It proved to be this combination of natural disaster allied to man-made failings that has led to such a dreadful loss of life in Haiti. Last year, the US Geological Survey recorded 17 earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or greater, but none wrought the devastation now being experienced in Port-au-Prince.

So, we must of necessity consider what happens to the survivors, left with no home nor means of earning even a meager existence. We are the nearest developed country.

However, in a time when our economy is already stretched to its limit and our welfare system barely can provide for the people we have already, we have to ask: "How many can we offer refuge to; And where do we put them? How do we care for them? What do we do with illiterate adults in terms of finding work for them.

The earthquake has brought all these issues to the forefront, and the answers to them are going to impact no one more than the United States.

https://en.mercopress.com/2010/01/15/haiti-sits-on-two-seismic-fault-lines-and-a-major-disaster-was-expected

posted on Jan 19, 2010 2:59 PM ()