Dominican Republic anxious to show difference to Haiti

Haiti’s neighbour on the island of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic has said its country was undamaged in last week’s massive earthquake and the country is available to offer support to the relief effort “in any way necessary”. A statement released by Ministry of Tourism said “the DR is making available its medical facilities for earthquake victims and is providing international relief organizations access to Haiti through the airport and seaports.” The statement also said the Republic’s transportation systems, communications systems, hotels, resorts, beaches and natural environment suffered no damage, a message designed to tell the world not to cancel its holiday bookings. (photo: Getty Images)

The statement also said the nation’s eight airports were open and receiving flights. However, the New York Times says the relief effort is using three key airports and a roadway in the Dominican Republic’s southern region to ferry supplies through mostly rural areas not frequented by visitors. Millions of Dominicans have donated time, money, supplies and expertise to help Haiti. But crossing the border is not the easiest of tasks.

The border crossing between Haiti and Dominican Republic is supposed to be open between 8am and 6pm. But as this intrepid traveller found in 2007, the reality is somewhat different. “An immigration official passed by and informed us that things opened at 9. By 9:30 more people had congregated, including immigration officials. The immigration people would ask us what we needed but when we would tell them…they just nodded and continued to eat their breakfast outside the locked office. Around 11, two hours after they were supposed to open, the windows opened the process began.” Even then it was a “shoving game” until “lots of stressful Spanish, shoving, yelling, and swatting bugs” got them over the border.

The blog writer also spoke about the trust involved in handing over a passport. This will not always work out for the best as a Trinidadian journalist has just found out. Dale Enoch is now stranded in the Dominican Republic after losing his passport at the border. Enoch came to the island to cover the earthquake for a Trinidad radio station and handed his passport at the border on his way to Haiti by bus. However he was unable to get his passport back when he returned and the bus company refused to take responsibility. “It appears that there is a passport racket going on,” Enoch said. “Once your passport has a US visa in it, it is attractive.”

But despite the corruption, the Dominican Republic is like another world compared to its impoverished neighbour. Michael Den Tandt of the Toronto Sun was also at the border and he noticed a great difference between the two countries. “On the Dominican side there’s grass, palm trees. There are well-paved highways, street signs and telephone poles. There are neat, small but well-kept and painted homes, with tidy yards,” he said. Compare that to Haiti with its “partly flooded gravel track, an impossible tangle of dilapidated little trucks, [and] teeming crowds desperate to get out.”

The Dominican Republic has now established a humanitarian corridor along the route between the two capitals of Santo Domingo and Port-au-Prince. Haitian President Rene Preval accepted a proposal from the Dominican Republic for 150 Dominican military troops to patrol the corridor in cooperation with a contingent of Peruvian troops from the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti. But DR’s foreign minister was forced to deny that Preval had turned down an earlier offer of 800 troops and they had to reach a compromise for a much smaller number. “When you are helping a friend and neighbour, there is no need to negotiate,” he said. “There were no negotiations and no rejection (from Haiti).”

And while relations between the two nations haven’t always been the most cordial, there is little doubt that Santo Domingo has played a crucial role in the earthquake relief effort. Many Haitians have been crossing the border into Jimani for medical attention almost overwhelming the local hospital which is lavish compared to the facilities back in Haiti. The hospital usually has about 30 hospital beds, but over the past week, there have been as many as 150 patients per day. But it is coping thanks to overseas relief and the better quality of DR health care compared to Haiti. As Tallahassee’s WCTV.tv noted, the Dominican Republic also suffered a 7.1 magnitude earthquake in September 2003. But only one person died, which was the result of a trauma induced heart attack. “The difference in death tolls between that quake and Haiti's come down to two factors,” said WCTV.tv. “It was in the middle of the night, and the buildings in the Dominican Republic have a higher code of infrastructure.”

Earthquake in Haiti: Port-au-Prince picks up the pieces

No one really knows how many people have died in Haiti’s earthquake; it is far too early to count the bodies. The country's prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive told CNN the final toll could be well over 100,000. Another senior Haitian politician Youri Latortue told AP the number could be as high as half a million, but both men conceded that nobody really knew. What most people did know was that the impact was utterly devastating. The 7.0 quake that struck 15km southwest of Port-au-Prince yesterday afternoon affected two million people and destroyed most of the capital’s buildings including the presidential palace, the parliament, the cathedral and most critically, all of the city’s hospitals.

Port-au-Prince is struggling to deal with the enormity of the disaster. The Times said the city's central Champs de Mars square resembled a huge open-air refugee camp but one without food, water or medicine. Medicins Sans Frontiers say there are hundreds of thousands of homeless people now sleeping in the streets. One of MSF's senior staff in Haiti, Stefano Zannini, was out for most of the night, assessing the needs in the city and looking at the state of the medical facilities. Zannini said the situation was chaotic. “I visited five medical centres, including a major hospital, and most of them were not functioning,” he said. “Many are damaged and I saw a distressing number of dead bodies.”

The country’s president René Préval said the damage caused by the magnitude 7.0 tremor was "unimaginable". The Huffington Post had a before and after shot that showed the extent of the damage at the presidential palace. But wondering where he would sleep that night was the least of Préval’s problems. “Parliament has collapsed, the tax office has collapsed, schools have collapsed, hospitals have collapsed” Mr. Préval told the Miami Herald. “There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them. All of the hospitals are packed with people. It is a catastrophe.”

The five-storey UN base at the Christopher Hotel was not spared; it also crumbled in the quake. The international body said 16 of its personnel were confirmed dead and between 100 and 150 more workers were still missing, These included UN mission chief Hedi Annabi of Tunisia and his deputy, Luis Carlos da Costa of Brazil. Annabi was meeting a Chinese delegation at the time of the quake. The Chinese are also among the missing. Just about the only good news from Haiti was the fact that most other areas of the country were spared - the capital took the brunt of the quake.

Mashable have listed ways people around the world can help. These include direct donations to organisations in the field such as Care, Direct Relief International and Oxfam, as well as via a site Google has updated to respond to the crisis Google Support Disaster Relief. Meanwhile Haitian hip-hop musician Wyclef Jean has used his Twitter feed to rally people to contribute to his grassroots Yele Haiti fund via text messages which automatically charge $5 to users’ mobile bills. The LA Times said the campaign has raised $400,000 in 24 hours.

Reuters's Lesley Wroughton says Haiti will need a lot more money than that to recover from this catastrophe. The impoverished country was already the poorest in the western hemisphere and it will take a massive, sustained global effort to rebuild the country. Wroughton says Haiti was rebuilding from its failed state status and had gradually impressed donors and investors through economic reforms, efforts to stamp out corruption and improve conditions for the four out of five Haitians who live in poverty. The IMF and World Bank had canceled $1.2 billion of debt, freeing up crucial funds for the government to build roads, bridges and prepare social programs.

Wroughton quoted CARE’s CEO Helene Gayle who said Haiti could no longer survive from crisis to crisis and needed to get on to a path of long-lasting, sustained change. Gayle called it Haiti’s Asian tsunami, and said it was a chance for the world to be generous and commit to helping Haiti beyond the current disaster. "We need to make sure that we're building back in a way that does not only return them to where they were but gives them an opportunity to really get a leg up after this is all over," Gayle said.

Indian Ocean tsunami fifth anniversary

Incredibly, five years have now passed since the Indian Ocean tsunami struck on 26 December 2004. The scale of the devastation was immense and it occurred on a hemispherical scale. 230,000 lives were lost in 11 countries, five million people were affected and $5 billion of damage was caused by one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded. (photo by simminch)

The drama of the day started at 7am local time in Indonesia when an earthquake of between 9.1 and 9.3 magnitude struck the sea between the west coast of Sumatra and the small island of Simeule. The event lasted an unprecedented ten minutes tearing a massive rupture 1,600 kms long. Depending on who’s talking it was either the second or third highest magnitude earthquake of the 20th century. Either way it was immense. The shift of mass and the massive release of energy very slightly altered the Earth's rotation. It caused the sea bed to rise several metres displacing billions of tonnes of sea water in the process.

Because of the north-south 1,600km fissure caused by the quake, the greatest waves went east and west. It took about a half hour for the wall of water to reach nearest landfall on the Sumatran Coast. Northern Aceh was worst hit with waves rising 20 metres high and travelling almost a kilometer inland. Some coastal villages were devastated losing up to 70 percent of their inhabitants. In all 167,000 were killed in Indonesia and another 37,000 listed as missing. An estimated 655,000 people were made homeless.

After another hour, the waves hit southern Thailand and its west coast islands. The waves swept locals and tourists off the beaches. 8,000 people died in Phuket, Phi Phi and elsewhere and a similar number were injured. At the same time the westerly-heading waves slammed 10m high into the east coast of Sri Lanka killing another 35,000 people and it made over a million and a half people homeless. A further 68 people died in Malaysia. By another half hour, it was taking severe casualties in India’s Tamil Nadu and Burma. The waves demolished railways, bridges, telecommunications facilities and harbours. The salt water contaminated large tracts of rich arable land.

And still it kept coming. After another 90 minutes, the tsunami engulfed the low-lying Maldives killing 100 people and displacing another 20,000. And two and half hours later still – some six hours after the original quake – the mammoth waves made landfall in Somalia. 300 people died there with 50,000 made homeless and many more livelihoods lost as 2,500 boats were destroyed. Most of the deaths were caused by asphyxiation from the silt and sand within the “black water” of the tsunami.

A massive worldwide relief operation began almost immediately. The biggest ever peacetime launch of military relief effort arrived in Aceh led by emergency teams from Australia, India, Japan and the US. Apart from immediate medical needs, the biggest threat was secondary death from famine and disease. One of the most important early tasks in Sumatra was to provide purification plants and potable water. This was difficult in a region where the Indonesian army was hauling over a thousand bodies a day from the rivers. Forensic scientists were stretched to the limit to identify the deceased. The process was complicated by sweltering heat, inconsistencies in data collection procedures used in various countries, and jurisdictional challenges. Port, road and transport facilities also needed to be restored.

Undermining the recovery effort was the influx of aid workers and media personnel who consumed scarce resources, making the cost of living soar. There were at least 500 journalists and news crews in the affected zone. And the sensationalism of much of the reporting added to the trauma of the survivors. Aceh did eventually recover and the tsunami had one unintended benefit; it brought an end to the long running war between the Indonesian military and Acehnese separatists.

Dealing with earthquakes will always be one of the perils of living in geologically active Sumatra. As recently as October, over 500 people were killed and thousands trapped under rubble when a 7.6 magnitude quake struck West Sumatra. But it will never forget the events of 26 December, 2004. The psychological trauma of confronting 20 metre waves is too deep. As one 10 year old girl told AFP "Even if I wanted to, I couldn't forget. It's the same for my friends who survived.”

Toads and Tofu Buildings: Sichuan crumbles in earthquake

The toads were first to realise the danger. On Saturday, residents of the remote Tanmu village in Sichuan woke to find thousands of toads leaving the area. This strange experience was repeated in several other Sichuan towns. In Manzhu, local media reported hundreds of thousands of toads had appeared on the streets. They quoted a local resident as saying he saw countless toads killed by passing vehicles as they crossed roads. He had never seen anything like it. A day earlier, people in Taizhou, Jiangsu province, also said they saw tens of thousands of toads on the city's streets. While scientific evidence is scanty about toads' earthquake sensing abilities, clearly they knew something was up. Unfortunately, no one heeded the toads' warning.

Two days later the region was devastated. A massive near-eight magnitude earthquake struck Sichuan razing entire towns to the ground leaving thousands trapped in the rubble. An estimated 60,000 to 100,000 people are missing and the official death toll is 15,000 and rising fast. 7,700 died in the town of Yingxiu alone, near the epicentre. In toad-less Manzhu, another 2,000 people died.


The 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck at 2.30pm local time Monday in Sichuan province in south-western China. The tremors were felt in faraway Shanghai where China’s tallest building, the Jinmao Tower, was evacuated. The epicentre was in Wenchuan County 90km northwest of the provincial capital Chengdu. All the highways into Wenchuan were damaged, hampering the rescue effort. Thousands of people were trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings. Communications with dozens of communities close to the epicentre of the quake remain cut so the full impact of the damage is not yet known. The city of Mianyang, home to China’s nuclear weapons design industry was hit hard sparking fears of a potential leak of radioactive material.

China has launched a massive relief operation mobilising its air force to help the 100,000 soldiers and police already in the region. The speed of the rescue is hampered by aftershocks and heavy rain. Most of the roads in the area have been cut off by the impact or subsequent landslides forcing rescue efforts to take to the air. Elite troops have parachuted in while the military will also conduct large-scale airdrops of food, clothing and blankets over the worst-hit areas.

A new hazard emerged yesterday when eye witnesses noticed major cracks in Zipingku dam, 30km from the epicentre. Zipingpu is a large water irrigation and water supply project in northwest Dujiangyan. The force of the quake ruined the baluster columns surrounding the dam. With communications cut off, most locals remain unaware of the danger. Xinhua news agency reported 2,000 troops are on their way to seal the cracks. If they fail, the Dujiangyan region could be swamped.

Elsewhere rescue efforts are concentrated on saving those trapped beneath fallen schools, businesses and homes. Two chemical plants collapsed in Shifang, crushing workers and releasing 80 tons of liquid ammonia. Because the quake occurred during school hours, students bore the brunt of the disaster. Several hundreds died in the collapse of Juyuan school. At least 201 students died at Muyu Middle School while many were sleeping. A third school at Wudu, 30km from the epicentre, has 130 dead children and 150 more still buried and feared dead. The Chinese embassy in the US estimated 4.3 million buildings collapsed or sustained major damage in the quake.

Some embittered survivors have already started blaming construction companies and local authorities. Building firms used substandard techniques and materials and corrupt local authorities deliberately ignored the problem. The resulting structures earned the name of "tofu buildings” referring to their softness. "It's nothing but corruption - they must have used sub-standard cement and steel," said one rescuer. Even the state-controlled media are raising questions about unsafe construction of schools. "We cannot afford not to raise uneasy questions about the structural quality of school buildings," the China Daily said in a rare critical commentary.