LDWorldWide

Every time there is an earthquake in a poorly governed country, the evidence of failed institutions lays bare. That is, a shocking number of buildings collapse and a ridiculous number of people are killed in the rubble. As David Brooks points out today,

On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.

The same thing happened in China in 2008, as I mentioned in this blog. When an earthquake hit poorly constructed schools there, thousands of children died. Haiti, like many of the countries I visit, has no building code; no corruption-free system of regulating and inspecting new construction; and little sense of societal obligation to fellow citizens beyond family. I have no doubt that there are plenty of rich owners of contracting firms in Haiti who are rarely troubled by meaningful regulatory constraints on the height and strength of the buildings they construct.

You don’t need to be a rich country to build structures that can withstand earthquakes. The aesthetic of an earthquake-conscious city has its drawbacks — Skopje could not have looked more thick and homely to me, when we arrived there in 1997 — but, when you lose thousands of people to natural disaster (as Macedonia did on July 12, 1963), these things matter less. Skopje rebuilt with significant help from the Japanese, but has since shown institutional mindfulness about the importance of well-constructed buildings.

The devastation in Haiti remains overwhelming. The reconstruction is a challenge for that country, our country, and the world.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 4:51 am and is filed under WorldWide . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.