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Salon.com has a good article on this

http://www.salon.com/news/chile_earthquake/index.html?story=/news/2010/02/27/cb_tale_of_two_earthquakes

MOney is a big difference, building codes, disaster preparedness and infrastructure are also huge and of course good governance.

Both are terrible disasters and it's good to ask why one is much worse.

Haiti spent many decades as essentially a failed state.

Chile has had many troubles but it never sank so low. Their society's state of readiness was much higher in many ways, thanks to money as you say.

Surprisingly, I heard that the earthquake in Chile was also more sevre. Or deeper. Or something. The ABC news only spent 2 minutes on the story when compared to the 10 minutes on sport.

Emperors Faithful wrote:Surprisingly, I heard that the earthquake in Chile was also more sevre. Or deeper. Or something. The ABC news only spent 2 minutes on the story when compared to the 10 minutes on sport.

Yep, according to our news Chile's 'quake was 500 times worse than Haiti's.

The difference is one is more sellable than the other, just like a white right wing terrorist who actually does do damage gets 5 minutes of state news and 2 minutes of nationwide news while a muslim terrorist who only hurts himself gets weeks of news coverage. If it fits the 'perfect news story' format it will get alot more time.

The haiti earthquake, although terrible, was nothing compared to other earthquakes around the world that have caused far greater deathcounts, with far less news coverage

BluntmanDC wrote:The difference is one is more sellable than the other, just like a white right wing terrorist who actually does do damage gets 5 minutes of state news and 2 minutes of nationwide news while a muslim terrorist who only hurts himself gets weeks of news coverage. If it fits the 'perfect news story' format it will get alot more time.

The haiti earthquake, although terrible, was nothing compared to other earthquakes around the world that have caused far greater deathcounts, with far less news coverage

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I'm trying to think of quakes with far greater death counts the the one in Haiti, and a quick search reveals it to be in the top 5 of the modern era (since 1900).

Certainly there have worse quakes, but not many with a higher death count.

Because Haiti was a -hole before the quake.

Emperors Faithful wrote:Surprisingly, I heard that the earthquake in Chile was also more severe. Or deeper. Or something. The ABC news only spent 2 minutes on the story when compared to the 10 minutes on sport.

Like the link says:
Chile is used to earthquakes, while most of Haiti's residents had either never experienced one at home(which implies some may have been caught in an earthquake while traveling at some point), or even experienced an earthquake at all.

Factor in the crummy state of the government and the poor condition of structures...

Voila. You've got a death count that will be insanely higher than any country that's readily experienced earthquakes, etc.

Emperors Faithful wrote:Surprisingly, I heard that the earthquake in Chile was also more sevre. Or deeper. Or something. The ABC news only spent 2 minutes on the story when compared to the 10 minutes on sport.

It was higher on the Ricter Scale which is geometric. So the Haiti one was something like 7.5 while Chile was 8.8 which is 100x (or so) more powerful. It was more powerful in terms of energy released but not nearly as bad in terms of damage or lives lost.

LESSON - Earthquake preparedness saves lives.

BluntmanDC wrote:The difference is one is more sellable than the other, just like a white right wing terrorist who actually does do damage gets 5 minutes of state news and 2 minutes of nationwide news while a muslim terrorist who only hurts himself gets weeks of news coverage. If it fits the 'perfect news story' format it will get alot more time.

The haiti earthquake, although terrible, was nothing compared to other earthquakes around the world that have caused far greater deathcounts, with far less news coverage

It's certainly the worst in a decade. The Sichuan earthquake in 2008 cost something like 60,000 lives. Sichuan was also unprepared, there was a lot of fraud in school and other construction so codes on the books were not observed, it also struck at 3 in the afternoon. but at least China is fairly developed and managed a quick response even sending in paratroopers to isolated areas (but keeping out foreign search and rescue teams until it was too late but that's another issue).

Haiti cost over 200,000 lives.

The worst natural disaster I can think of in recent memory is of course the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004 with something like half a million (!!) lives lost.

For a bit of scale, September 11th had about 3000 deaths, Hurricane Katrina 1800.

We don't know about Chile yet but the NY Times is saying 700. 700 dead for an earthquake near the capital that was a 100x more powerful than Haiti.

Again, earthquake preparedness saves lives. There will always be deaths, always be damage but the difference is amazing.

Interestingly the Hanshin Earthquake (Japan) in 1994 was a 6.8 but 6000 people died. I wonder if that was a lack of preparedness, poor preparedness, a more congested area or something else.

EDIT - here's some depressing reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters

Another important thing to remember is that the Richter scale only measures the total energy released by the quake, it doesn’t factor in where that quake occurred. As well as being centred in a less populated area, the Chilean quake occurred much deeper in the ground. While nominally much more powerful most of the energy of the had quake had dissipated by the time it reached the surface. On the other hand, the Haitian quake was much closer to the surface, and centred on a densely populated region.

Disaster preparedness counts for a lot, but so does luck.

The effects of an earthquake depend on a number of factors among which are the time of day it strikes.

For instance, an eathquake at mealtime has more serious effects in Haiti than Japan because in Haiti a lot of people cook on portable kerosene stoves which are easily upset and cause fires.

Chile is a country that lives on a fault line. They have experieced quakes before, know what to do with them, and have much higher building codes.

Haiti has NO building codes, and most deaths occured because their crappy shack fell on them. Plus, disease, fires, and looting more than likely accounted for several hundred more. Haiti also has never experience any kind of quake, so there was no expectation of it to happen...with these things combined, we got a perfect storm of natural disater for the people of that nation.

Imagine a box...put a mouse in the box and then shake it, alot. Let the mouse out. Mouse is probably hurt, or perhaps dead, but imaging doing the same again with adding two or three bricks, or broken glass into same box and then shaking it....im pretty sure all we will get is mouse puree at that point.