Thread by @MiamiHerald

A decade ago, Haiti was rocked by catastrophe. A major earthquake claimed 316,000 lives. Buildings crumbled in seconds and more than a million were left homeless.

What would happen if disaster struck Haiti again today? (THREAD)

As Haiti prepares to mark the 10th anniversary of an unimaginable disaster, Haitians and the global community that pledged to help the country rebuild can point to a few signs of progress. hrld.us/308X5Kc

The public square that became a densely crowded tent city, the Champ de Mars, today is teeming with ice cream vendors, student drivers and a new government administrative corridor in the center of Port-au-Prince.

The palace hasn’t been rebuilt, but several public structures have been reconstructed, and a new $89 million Parliament complex is under way.

But Haiti still struggles with its recovery. Billions of dollars in mismanaged money and unaccounted-for aid have left the country no more ready today to withstand another massive earthquake than it was the day the 7.0-magnitude tremor hit.

“I am afraid another big earthquake will produce the same results. We have not even had drills in the schools or in the public administration,” said Leslie Voltaire, an architect and urban planner who was involved in reconstruction planning in the early days of Haiti’s recovery.

“So we have not learned, really.”

Ten years later, lawmakers have yet to vote on a new-quake resistant building code. Ambitious projects like a new hospital, or the $300 million Caracol Industrial Park, have yet to realize their potential.

Ten years later, the economy, which saw some growth after an estimated $7.6 billion in aid flowed into Haiti, is in ruins.

“The hope for a new day in Haiti was something people really believed in and really engaged in,” said Luis Alberto Moreno, president of Inter-American Development Bank, which pledged $2 billion in aid at the International Donors Conference at the U.N. in New York in March 2010.

“Unfortunately what I find today is that the energy of the donor community [compared with] right after the earthquake and today, has truly changed,” Moreno said.

At the March 2010 New York donors conference, 58 governments and multilateral donors pledged $10.77 billion to reconstruct Haiti over 10 years and another $10.37 billion in recovery and humanitarian assistance for the first two years.

Questions about what happened to the money dominate many discussions, and an effort was recently launched by the former special adviser to the U.N. Secretary-General, Dr. Paul Farmer, to get information on the two pots of money.

The exercise has proven difficult, with billions of dollars in pledges still unaccounted for.

But nowhere are the broken promises of reconstruction more apparent than in the camps that persist today. For some Haitians, this anniversary marks 10 years of living under a tarp, with no running water, latrines, electricity or security.

In any other country that had a disaster like Haiti’s, the population would have recovered already, says Junior Alexis, a leader of Teren Toto, one of six makeshift settlements that make up Village Caradeux.

“The people did not anticipate this.” hrld.us/308X5Kc

The @MiamiHerald partnered with the @pulitzercenter on Crisis Reporting for the series, ‘Haiti Earthquake: A Decade of Aftershocks,’ which looks at questions around aid and rebuilding in the Caribbean nation 10 years after the disaster.

@pulitzercenter A decade later, we want our readers to weigh in on how their lives changed after the 2010 #Haiti earthquake.

Tell us how the earthquake impacted your life — share your story in the form below. hrld.us/39J0Nym

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