Building for earthquake risk

On Saturday 6 February 2010 Channel 4 at 7:30 pm repeated Haiti's Killer Quake: Why It Happened.  Part of the programme showed how to make buildings that cost a little more (maybe 15% more) but are much safer in the event of an earthquake.  Natural disasters as they are called are often worse than they might be because of the things that people have done.  A country like Haiti will need money from other countries to be able to build to withstand the next earthquake.

Haiti's plight was desperate even before the earthquake.  I wrote on my blog about an earlier Channel 4 programme on Haiti.  There were some comments after that programme saying that a comparison between Haiti and the Dominican Republic could be illuminating.  The two countries share an island but Haiti seems to be much poorer. 

The Belfast and Beyond blog on this website includes Haiti: from injustice to catastrophe with an article by a former Amnesty researcher who has also been a UN human rights observer in Haiti.