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>There are valuable lessons from the Haiti earthquake disaster about why it caused many victims and caused huge damage.. New Scientist Weekly said the reason that the number of casualties in a single article published on January 19, 2009.

The earthquake that shook Haiti last week described by the United Nations (UNO) As the worst humanitarian crisis in decades, with an estimated death toll between 50,000 to 200,000 people.

The UNO says the number of casualties in Haiti due to the earthquake hit a densely populated capital, which has hindered the movement of many institutions working for disaster relief.

Meanwhile, geologists who spoke to New Scientist revealed other reasons why Haiti earthquake is so huge and warned that more powerful shocks will soon follow, because not all latent energy released in an earthquake tragedy.

• First, the epicenter of the earthquake occurred at shallow, so do not give enough time to warn residents to get out of the building. This is different from the earthquake in episentrumnya.
• Second, Port au Prince is built not on rock but on the clay that vanish as soon as a shock.
• Finally, the standard building could not resist a big earthquake.

If the same earthquake hit California, then the number of casualties almost certainly be lower. “Construction of a better building will save many human lives,” said Chuck DeMets, tectonic geologists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A comparison with two very similar earthquakes backs up this assertion.

In 1988, the Spitak magnitude-6.9 earthquake in Armenia took more than 25,000 lives. By contrast the magnitude-7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake in California in 1989 caused only 63 deaths.

Both occurred in densely populated regions, but they had very different outcomes.

“The difference in the numbers of fatalities illustrates the huge effect that high building standards can have in saving people’s lives,” said DeMets.

The multi-storey concrete buildings that made up much of Port-au-Prince in Haiti proved to be death traps when the earthquake struck.

“The buildings were brittle and had no flexibility, breaking catastrophically when the earthquake struck,” said Ian Main, a seismologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK.