Haiti 2010 12th January earthquake

in 2008 scientist realised that the North America plate a the Arabian plate had stooped moving at all, normally the conservative plate margin moved at 7mm per year, they predicted that a huge earthquake could occur and that it was likely to impact the capital, in 2010 the earthquake struck at 4.51pm.

At the 4:51pm local time a magnitude 7 on the Richter scale earthquake struck Haiti killing a total of 250,000 people and leaving nothing but rubble behind, why was this earthquake so destructive and why did it claim so many lives?

Before I can explain that there are some more key facts and background knowledge that needs to be explained, the earthquake was a magnitude 7 on the richter scale and was followed 8 days later with a 5.1 earthquake on the 20th January at 06:03 local time, the enitial earthquake has a hypocenter of 13km classing this as a shallow earthquake (Shallow earthquakes are between 0 and 70 km deep; intermediate earthquakes, 70 - 300 km deep; and deep earthquakes, 300 - 700 km deep.) causing it to be very destructive as little energy was released by the time it reached the surface, the epicentre was 24km wsw of the capital of Haiti Port-au-Prince.

When the earthquake reached Port-au-Prince it caused chaos and destruction, 50% of its buildings were destroyed and a local tsunami killed 7 people, the port was destroyed by liquefaction down to the poorly compacted soft ground and lateral spreading of the higher land dropping into the sea.

The main points that caused such a high amount of death were the fact that:

• the buildings were not regulated and had no seismic bracing which leads to the pancake effect on a very large amount of buildings 

• Port-au-Prince was a quickly developing county and houses were built on unstable slopes which were made even more unstable by the earthquake and caused multiple landslides 

• a process called amplification (as seismic waves such as Rayleigh and surface love waves passed through soft sediment the waves moment are amplified and increased resulting in a more intense shaking) caused houses to shake more violently as they were built on soft ground  

Because the port was unusable aid had to be dropped my helicopters and land vehicles however because of the state of the roads this was nearly impossible