When Bad Engineering Makes a Natural Disaster Even Worse
In the Haiti earthquake of 2010, hundreds of thousands of people were killed or injured - the chaos caused was so extensive that it's difficult to pin down an exact number, with different agencies and non-government organisations counting the damage in different ways.
Yet when an even larger earthquake hit Chile only a month later, fewer than 600 people died. Why the difference? One major factor was that Chile has strict rules about what building techniques and materials are allowed, while Haiti had no building code at all. In this video, Peter Haas (co-founder of the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group) discusses the events in Haiti as a ‘disaster of engineering’ and shows how building regulations, policy and education could prevent similar losses in future earthquakes.