U.N. Head: Haiti Worst Crisis in Decades, Disregards 2004 Indian Ocean 9.0 Earthquake, Massive Death Toll Due to Tsunami
While the Haiti earthquake is a disaster of epic proportion, we couldn’t help but take issue with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s recent remark that Haiti was “one of the worst humanitarian crises in decades”.
From the Guardian:
The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, today described the situation in Haiti as “one of the worst humanitarian crises in decades”, as the Foreign Office confirmed that a British national had been killed in the earthquake.
“The damage, destruction, loss of life is just overwhelming,” Ban said shortly before arriving in Port-au-Prince.
Here’s a short refresher course on the 9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami which occurred 5 years ago and whose devastation reached 4,000 miles, from Indonesia to the east coast of Africa, with a death toll estimated between 180,000 to 320,000.
According to the National Geographic, the resulting tsunami may have the most deadliest tsunami in history:
he earthquake that generated the great Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 is estimated to have released the energy of 23,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
Giant forces that had been building up deep in the Earth for hundreds of years were released suddenly on December 26, shaking the ground violently and unleashing a series of killer waves that sped across the Indian Ocean at the speed of a jet airliner.By the end of the day more than 150,000 people were dead or missing and millions more were homeless in 11 countries, making it perhaps the most destructive tsunami in history.
According to Live Science, the total death toll range from 180,000 to 320,000.
There’s also a considerable difference between the relief response time to the 2004 tsunami disaster, which occurred at a distance of over 10,000 miles from the United States and the U.N. Headquarters, and to the Haiti earthquake which is located a relatively short distance-1.5 hour by plane-from the United States (Miami). The extent of the devastation was unprecedented, stretching 4,000 miles from Indonesia to the east coast of Africa.
Seven days after the tsunami struck the BBC reported Chaos hinders Aceh relief drive.
A shattered infrastructure is stopping the delivery of aid in Indonesia’s quake-ravaged Aceh province.
Some 500,000 people are without homes and desperately need help, a government spokesman told the BBC.
The official Indonesian death toll from Sunday’s disaster is nearly 80,000, but the Health Ministry said it would probably rise to more than 100,000.
The government said it had given up trying to provide accurate death totals, now the numbers were so large.
And,
The BBC’s Andrew Harding in Aceh’s provincial capital, Banda Aceh, says a logistical nightmare awaits the aid operation now taking shape.
He says foreign doctors have arrived in force at the main hospital in the city, but many essential items are in desperately short supply.
Infections are spreading among the injured, while food and clean drinking water – as well as the fuel needed to deliver it – remain scarce. The city’s petrol depot was severely damaged in the disaster.
Another problem is that government offices, clinics and military bases have all been destroyed and many of the people who would normally run these institutions are dead.
In Banda Aceh, bodies still lie on the streets. One resident told the BBC: “At first when we saw the dead bodies we took them away. But after the fourth day we didn’t do it any more.”
A UN official, relief co-ordinator Margareta Wahlstrom, said aid agencies were delivering mobile offices to the disaster zone so that aid workers could be “totally self-contained”.
A base camp for international aid workers was expected to be ready by Friday, the UN said.
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