Saturday, February 11, 2012

2010 Haiti Earthquake

In January, 2010, a catastrophic 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti near Port-au-Prince, the nation's capital. The Haitian government reported that an estimated 316,000 people died, 300,000 were injured and 1,000,000 were made homeless by the quake. Tens of thousands of building collapsed, most of which have not been rebuilt two years later. Thousands of people still live in tents and other make-shift structures put together out of whatever material people could find.

A cholera outbreak that began in October, 2010, and continued through the end of 2011 has claimed some 6,000 lives, adding to the misery caused by the earthquake. To make matters worse, only a very small percentage of international aid that had been pledged has actually been delivered, and the reconstruction effort has been widely criticized by international aid agencies.

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