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1770 Port-au-Prince earthquake

Field	Value
title	1770 Port-au-Prince earthquake
pre-1900	yes
local-date
local-time	19:15
map2	{{Location map+	Haiti
relief	1
width	250
float	none
{{Location map~	Haiti	label		lat=18.42	long=-72.79	mark=Bullseye1.png	marksize=40	position=top}}
{{Location map~	Haiti	label	Port-au-Prince	lat=18.53	long=-72.33	mark=	marksize=10	position=right}}
{{Location map~	Haiti	label	Léogâne	lat=18.511	long=-72.633	mark=Black pog.svg	marksize=8	position=top}}
{{Location map~	Haiti	label	Petit-Goâve	lat=18.435	long=-72.86	mark=Black pog.svg	marksize=8	position=bottom}}
{{Location map~	Haiti	label	Miragoâne	lat=18.446	long=-73.09	mark=Black pog.svg	marksize=8	position=left}}
magnitude	7.5Mw
depth	10 km
location
intensity
countries affected	Saint-Domingue, Captaincy General of Santo Domingo, Jamaica
tsunami	Yes
casualties	250+

| pre-1900 = yes | local-date = | local-time = 19:15

The 1770 Port-au-Prince earthquake took place at 7:15 pm local time on June 3, on the Enriquillo fault near Port-au-Prince, Saint-Domingue, the French colony that is now the country of Haiti.

Damage

The earthquake was strong enough to destroy Port-au-Prince, and leveled all the buildings between Lake Miragoâne and Petit-Goâve, to the west of Port-au-Prince. The Plain of the Cul-de-Sac, a rift valley under Port-au-Prince that extends eastwards into the Dominican Republic, experienced extensive soil liquefaction. The ground under Port-au-Prince liquefied, throwing down all its buildings, including those that had survived the 1751 earthquake. Strong shocks were felt in Cap-Haïtien, about 160 km away from the estimated epicenter in the Léogâne Arrondissement. Some chimneys on the distant island of Jamaica collapsed.

It is estimated that 200 people died in Port-au-Prince in collapsed buildings, including 79 of the 80 people in Port-au-Prince's hospital. The death toll would have been higher, but the earthquake was preceded by a rumbling noise that gave people time to flee their houses before the main tremor, which consisted of two shocks lasting a total of four minutes. Fifty people died in Léogâne.

Tsunami

The earthquake generated a tsunami that came ashore along the Gulf of Gonâve, and rolled as much as 7.2 km inland into the Cul-de-Sac depression, though this might have been confounded with the effects of the liquefaction.

Aftermath

The aftermath of the earthquake saw much more death as thousands of slaves escaped in the chaos, the local economy collapsed and 15,000 slaves died in the subsequent famine. An additional 15,000 people died from what is thought to have been gastrointestinal anthrax from eating tainted meat bought from Spanish traders.

References

(1912). "Great earthquakes in the island of Haiti". [[Seismological Society of America]].
(1770). "France". The Scots Magazine.
Sublette, Ned. (2007). "Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, Volume 1". Chicago Review Press.
Panagiotopoulos, D. G. I.. (1995). "Long-term earthquake prediction in Central America and Caribbean Sea based on the time- and magnitude-predictable model". [[Seismological Society of America]].
O'Loughlin, Karen Fay. (2003). "Caribbean Tsunamis: A 500-Year History from 1498–1998". [[Springer Science+Business Media.
Ali, Syed Tabrez. (2008). "Coulomb stress evolution in Northeastern Caribbean over the past 250 years due to coseismic, postseismic and interseismic deformation". [[Oxford University Press]].

Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

earthquakes-in-haiti 1770s-earthquakes 1770-in-the-caribbean 1770-disasters 18th-century-tsunamis saint-domingue 18th-century-in-haiti

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