PORT-AU-PRINCE, February 20 (Prensa Latina) Haiti’s seismological services register a hundred tremors every month, Claude Pretit, director of the Department of Mines and Energy, confirmed today, according to local media.
Pretit assured that these statistics are not alarming as professionals are aware of the Caribbean country’s high seismic risk as it rests on multiple tectonic faults.
He told Radio Métropole that last Wednesday’s tremor of 5.3 degrees on the Richter scale could be caused by the release of energy from secondary faults unknown to experts.
Located to the west of the island of Hispaniola, Haiti sits within the Septentrional Oriente Fault to the north and the Enriquillo River that crosses the Tiburón Peninsula and the southwestern part of the country where Port-au-Prince is located.
This latest rupture was responsible for the deadly earthquakes of 2010 and 2021, which killed more than 200,000, injured thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands.
Specialists agree that the probability of a similar event is very high, and the country’s vulnerability increases the damage.
Earlier this year, Pretit lamented that it is still being built without taking telluric movements into account, particularly in vulnerable neighborhoods like the Cité Soleil to the north of this capital.
He also warned that cities like Cap Haitien and Port de Paix in the far north could also experience tsunamis as a result of an earthquake.
In 2022 alone, the Office of Mines and Energy recorded 1,541 earthquakes between 0.5 and 5.5 degrees on the Richter scale, most of them in the departments of Grand Anse and Nippes.
For this reason, the expert calls for preventive measures, compliance with building regulations against vibrations, the interior layout of living spaces and the acquisition of culture regarding behavior before, during and after an earthquake.
jf/ane