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Cap-Haitian May Be At Risk From Tsunamis
Cap-Haitian May Be At Risk From Tsunamiswww.haitiquotidien.com - Thursday March 24, 2011
By Joseph Guyler Delva PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - Haitians traumatized by a big earthquake last year have watched Japan's disaster with a mixture of sympathy and horror, and experts say the poor Caribbean state could be hit anytime by a similar tsunami. Most at risk from tsunamis is Haiti's north coast and second city of Cap-Haitien, because fault lines criss-crossing the north of the island of Hispaniola just into the sea, according to the country's top seismologist, Claude Prepetit. "A tsunami can occur in Cap-Haitien today, or in several decades," said Prepetit, who had warned Haitian authorities of the country's high vulnerability to earthquakes a year before the magnitude 7 >> 0 quake struck on January 12, 2010. It devastated the overcrowded capital Port-au-Prince and killed more than 300,000 people, as poorly constructed and poorly located buildings and homes collapsed like cards. Scientists have since discovered that the Haitian quake also caused landslides above and below water, triggering tsunamis that washed ashore onto sparsely populated coastal areas of the country, killing at least three people. Prepetit said seeing the destruction inflicted by the March 11 9 >> 0 magnitude quake and ensuing tsunami on the northeast of Japan, one of the world's wealthiest nations which also has among the best developed disaster-response plans, was a sobering warning for Haiti's impoverished population. "People here were shocked to watch on TV cars, trucks, boats floating or being thrown like toys by the giant waves of the tsunamis," Prepeti told Reuters late on Wednesday. Haiti's biggest cities, Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haitien, are on the coast. In 1942, Cap-Haitien and Port-de-Paix were hit by a tsunami that triggered waves 16 feet high.
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