Mammon, more than God, caused the Christchurch earthquake 'miracle'

By Geoffrey Lean World Last updated: September 5th, 2010

It’s an “absolute miracle” that no deaths have yet been reported from the earthquake that struck New Zealand early yesterday, says Bob Parker, mayor of the stricken city of Christchurch. You can see what he means – but Mammon may have had more to do with it than God. For it underlines how wealthy countries and communities suffer much less from a given natural disaster than poor ones.

The quake was the same magnitude, 7.1 on the Richter Scale as the one that hit Haiti in January, and its epicentre was slightly closer to Christchurch than the Caribbean one was from Port au Prince (13, as against 16, miles).But the latest estimates reckon that some 230,000 people died in Haiti, compared to no-one in New Zealand.

Of course there were differences. Yesterday’s quake hit at 4.35 in the morning – when almost everyone was indoors, asleep – for example, while January’s, with almost exact symmetry, occurred at 4.53 in the afternoon. But main difference is that New Zealand is just short of the top 30 countries in the world, listed by per capita GDP, while Haiti is firmly in the bottom 30.

Eighty per cent of earthquake deaths are caused by collapsing buildings and so properly built ones save lives in even the fiercest shocks, while poorly constructed ones become killers. Eighty six per cent of the people of Haiti live in tightly packed slums, and – besides those killed – two million were made homeless when buildings collapsed.

It has long been so, even in richer countries. Most of the 100,000 people who perished in a 1988 earthquake in Armenia – then part of the Soviet Union – were in cheap concrete buildings. And even in Japan, most of the structures that collapsed in the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which killed 5,000, were substandard constructions rushed up after the Second World War.

An 1976 earthquake in Guatemala City, which killed 23,000, was even dubbed the “class quake” because of the accuracy with which it hit the city’s poorest communities and spared the richer ones. So let’s be glad of the miracle in Christchurch – but recognise that world poverty is the greatest disaster of all.