How Poverty Makes Natural Disasters Worse

When Pat Robertson infamously suggested that Haitians had been punished by God with a massive earthquake for making a pact with the devil way back in 1791, I wrote him off for the umpteenth time as a crazy extremist. What stuck with me, though, was Robertson's "evidence": Haiti has been cursed with poverty for hundreds of years, and now its capital has been utterly destroyed by a devastating earthquake. Who's to say there isn't an angry deity upstairs, saddling an already desperate country with an extra dose of misery, just for good measure?

This type of flawed reasoning -- that poverty-ridden Haiti just happened to be destroyed by an astronomically deadly earthquake -- has formed the backbone of most news coverage over the past week. In articles and TV segments, reporters seem to forget that disasters don't strike equally across the globe; they hit the poor the hardest.

Take Hurricane Katrina. When it struck Louisiana in 2005, the rich packed up their suitcases and headed out of town, while impoverished residents without access to private transportation were left to ride out a lethal storm and, perhaps even worse, its seemingly endless aftermath. Paired with FEMA's inadequate response, Katrina became a disaster of attrition, wearing low-income New Orleans residents down and starving them into despair.

What newscasters, government officials, international agencies, and especially Pat Robertson need to recognize is this: the worst natural disasters don't intentionally seek out poor people. They just do the most damage to people with the fewest resources.

A 2004 report on "Poverty and Disasters in the United States" finds that "the poor in the U.S. are more vulnerable to natural disasters, due to such factors as place and type of residence, building construction and social exclusion." Its suggestions for mitigating the destruction caused by future disasters? Offer subsidy programs to protect mobile homes against high winds; require that FEMA understands and caters to diverse demographics in disaster zones; demand from the media a better understanding of how disasters affect low-income Americans; and improve the structural safeness of affordable housing without increasing the living costs of residents. In short, invest in the poor.

It's doubtful that America will ever face a natural disaster as lethal as the earthquake in Haiti. We're one of the richest countries in the world, with infrastructure throughout much of the country that's built to withstand severe storms and quakes. (A 6.9-magnitude earthquake in Southern California in 1989 killed 63 people, compared to the 75,000 already buried from the 7.0-magnitude quake in Haiti.) But what about another Katrina? Unless we step up efforts to help the 13% of Americans living in destitution (and that number doesn't even factor in our absurdly low federal poverty line), the risk -- nay, the high probability -- remains.

Photo credit: springsrescuemission