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In many ways, the catastrophic quake that struck Haiti on Tuesday was the perfect storm: A massive, shallow eruption below a densely populated city with few, if any, building codes. The magnitude 7.0 quake occurred along the boundary separating two major tectonic plates, the Caribbean and North American plates. Most of the movement along these plates is what is known as left-lateral strike slip motion, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, with the Caribbean Plate moving eastward in relation to the North American Plate. Kate Hutton, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology, said the quake was similar to quakes seen along the San Andreas Fault: It was shallow, a fact that enhances the intensity and makes it more localized to the region right along the fault. "We are not surprised by any of it," Hutton said. The Haiti quake had many similarities with the 1989 Loma Prieta quake in Northern California. That quake, said Tom Heaton, director of Caltech's Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory, "caused a lot of damage, but it wasn't a disaster like this in terms of the number of people injured and killed."
Much of that difference has to do with the way buildings are constructed. Engineers and others well-versed in the strict guidelines that California, Japan and other quake-prone zones mandate, blame the devastation seen in Haiti on poor building construction and rapid urban growth. |
