Deja Vu

January 13, 2010

You Cannot Fight It

Tags:

Arkansas,

earthquake,

Haiti,

natural disaster

2010: A large earthquake struck Haiti Tuesday afternoon, toppling the National Palace and causing widespread damage to the country's poorly built homes. The epicenter of the 7.0 magnitude quake was just a few miles from the nation's capital Port-au-Prince. While Haiti is located in a seismically active region, the last quake this large to strike hit in 1751. And the New York Times reports that this quake is just the latest in a series of natural disasters to strike the nation.

“Everybody is just totally, totally freaked out and shaken,” Henry Bahn, an official of the United States Department of Agriculture who was visiting Haiti, told The Associated Press. “The sky is just gray with dust.”

Haiti’s many man-made woes—its dire poverty, political infighting and proclivity for insurrection—have been exacerbated repeatedly by natural disasters. At the end of 2008, four hurricanes flooded whole towns, knocked out bridges and left a destitute population in even more desperate conditions.

1812: The island of Hispanola isn't the only place that has experienced violent quakes spaced out over many years. The New Madrid fault, located near the Missouri-Arkansas border, delivered some of the strongest quakes the world has ever known. A string of four quakes, the strongest of which reached a magnitude of 8.0 shook the entire eastern United States in 1811 and 1812. George Heinrich Crist, a farmer near present-day Louisville, wrote about the devastation the January 1812 trembler wrought. Though the fault seems quiet now, the USGS estimates that a quake between magnitude 7.5 and 8.0 has a ten percent chance of striking the region in the next 50 years.

What are we gonna do? You cannot fight it cause you do not know how. It is not something that you can see. In a storm you can see the sky and it shows dark clouds and you know that you might get strong winds but this you can not see anything but a house that just lays in a pile on the ground—not scattered around and trees that just falls over with the roots still on it. The earth quake or what ever it is come again today. It was as bad or worse than the one in December. We lost our Amandy Jane in this one—a log fell on her. We will bury her upon the hill under a clump of trees where Besys Ma and Pa is buried. A lot of people thinks that the devil has come here. Some thinks that this is the beginning of the world coming to a end.

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