The tragedy behind the tragedy in Haiti

By Selwyn Duke

Natural disasters are bad.
They’re far worse when they combine with unnatural disasters. We’re all calling
the recent Haitian earthquake devastating, but it’s more correct to say that in
Port-Au-Prince there is tremendous devastation. And there is a difference, as
more “devastating” quakes have caused less devastation in other places.

Famed
economist Walter Williams brings this to light in a recent column.
He points out that while Haiti's 7.0 quake has a death toll of more than
200,000, northern California's 1989 Loma Prieta 7.1 quake and San Francisco’s
1906, 7.8 quake — which was about eight times the intensity of Haiti’s —
claimed respectively, only 63 and 3,000 lives.

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