At 4:53 p.m. on January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck just 25 kilometers from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, collapsing government buildings, hospitals, and homes across the densely populated capital. Estimates of the dead range from 100,000 to over 220,000, making it one of the deadliest earthquakes in modern history.
The quake lasted less than a minute but destroyed the Presidential Palace, the National Assembly building, and the cathedral of Port-au-Prince, along with an estimated 250,000 residences and 30,000 commercial buildings. Haiti, already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, had almost no building codes and few resources for earthquake-resistant construction, which turned a natural disaster into a humanitarian catastrophe.
Hospitals collapsed with patients and doctors inside them. The United Nations mission headquarters fell, killing the mission chief and dozens of peacekeepers. In the chaotic days that followed, rescue teams from dozens of countries dug through rubble by hand, often with makeshift tools, searching for survivors trapped in what had once been apartment blocks and schools.
The humanitarian response became one of history's largest, with billions of dollars pledged internationally, yet reconstruction faltered for years amid corruption, weak governance, and a subsequent cholera epidemic introduced by UN peacekeepers that killed thousands more. The earthquake remains a defining trauma in Haiti's modern history.
Key people: René Préval