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Quiz yourself on Natural Hazards OverviewGet your flashcardsBuild my revision planTrack my progress🌋 The Same Earthquake, Two Completely Different Disasters
Fourteen months later, on 22 February 2011, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck the New Zealand city of Christchurch. It was weaker than Haiti's earthquake. When the dust settled, 185 people had died.
The maths here should stop you in your tracks. Haiti's earthquake was roughly five times more powerful than Christchurch's. Yet it killed 1,700 times more people. The buildings in Port-au-Prince, mostly built with no enforcement of construction codes, collapsed like cardboard. The buildings in Christchurch, built to strict New Zealand seismic standards, largely held. Emergency services in New Zealand deployed within minutes. In Haiti, the earthquake destroyed the government's own offices, killing civil servants and leaving the state barely able to function. International aid took days to arrive. Cholera, carried in contaminated water, later killed a further 10,000 people — a death toll that would not have happened in a country with functioning water infrastructure.
This is the central lesson of natural hazards geography: physical magnitude does not determine disaster magnitude. Vulnerability, preparedness, and the choices societies make before disaster strikes determine whether an earthquake kills 185 people or 316,000.
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