Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
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“
Imagine all of the Federal buildings in Washington collapsing in less than a minute killing 30-40% of
our government workforce, crippling the tax collection system leaving the government no money to
pay salaries or overhead. Our government, which seems to barely work at full capacity with gleaming
buildings and a gargantuan budget, would come to a halt.
This is the state of Haiti today. . . . At the University Hospital, the entire second-year nursing class
was crushed and died in the nursing school. Teachers and nearly all the schools were destroyed. Dur-
ing the five o'clock hour of the quake all the priests and seminarians met in their churches. Most of
the priests, the future priests and their churches are now gone. The Universities with most of their
precious intellectual capital of professors and the best and the brightest of Haiti are gone.
Now imagine New York after a similar disaster, a city of 8 million with a loss of a million citizens,
with four million people living in the streets, with winter about to come and a marginally functioning
government without resources to help. . . .
”
—Mark Hyman, “Haiti Weather Report: Mostly Foggy With
Rain Storms Expected,”
Huffington Post
, March 20, 2010
When a major disaster strikes, like the recent mega earthquake and tsunami in Japan or Hur-
ricane Katrina in the United States, all the normal supply lines, utilities, and central services
that we take for granted are either crippled, destroyed, or what little that is left functioning is
hopelessly overloaded. When the scope of the disaster is huge, as in these cases, most of the
doctors, nurses, firemen, and policemen are either injured themselves, busy caring for family
members, or evacuated from the area, and those civil servants that remain will be seriously
overworked and under-supplied. In times like these, the majority of survivors are left to fend
for themselves for several days, and sometimes for weeks or months. Mother Nature built into
each and every one of us a desire to provide food, shelter, water, and protection for ourselves
and loved ones. It is the aim and purpose of this topic to enable the reader to do just that!
Regardless of whether the disaster is in the “first world” or the “third world,” when the
scale of a disaster is huge, central services, utilities, and public-support systems are overloaded
and fail. When a 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck Kobe, Japan (a country priding itself at being
the most earthquake ready nation in the world), massive liquefaction of wet gravelly soils un-
