ARTICLE - CORRUPT SOCIETIES AND QUAKES

CORRUPT SOCIETIES HAVE GREATER DEATH TOLLS FROM QUAKES: REPORT
(Montreal Gazette) - By Margaret Munro

Corruption kills, according to a report that says bribes and covert cost-cutting in the construction industry are fuelling the growing death toll of earthquakes.

The study, published Wednesday to coincide with the anniversary of Haiti's devastating quake, "found that corrupt societies have the largest death tolls from earthquakes."

It also warns "international and national funds set aside for earthquake resistance in countries where corruption is endemic are especially prone to being siphoned off."

The report, published in the journal Nature, comes complete with graphs charting corruption and quake tolls in different countries.

The construction industry — worth $7.5 trillion annually and expected to double in the next decade — "is recognized as being the most corrupt segment of the global economy," says the report by Roger Bilham, a seismologist at the University of Colorado, and Nicholas Ambraseys, a quake hazard specialist at Imperial College London.

"During earthquakes, the consequences of decades of shoddy construction are revealed on a catastrophic scale," they say, noting that bribes can subvert inspection and licensing processes, and covert cost-cutting can compromise the quality of structures.

The report estimates 212,000 people died as homes, hospitals and offices collapsed in Haiti last January. And it notes that the number of people killed in buildings continues to climb despite major advances in how to engineer and build structures to withstand quakes.

Since 1980 they estimate 550,000 people around the world have died in shoddy buildings during quakes, and Bilham says millions more live and work in buildings he describes as "weapons of mass destruction."

To get a read on the impact of corruption, Bilham and Ambraseys compared quake fatalities in buildings, with gross national income per capita and country's ranking on the corruption perception index generated annually by Transparency International, an organization working to reduce corruption.

Their statistical analysis concludes 83 per cent of all deaths from building collapse in earthquakes over the past 30 years occurred in countries that are "anomalously corrupt", which they define as more corrupt than one would expect from their per capita income.

Italy, Greece and Russia are among the countries perceived as corrupt with high quake fatalities, while Chile and New Zealand are less corrupt than might be expected from their per capita income, and have fewer earthquake deaths.

Haiti and Iran are described as "extreme examples" of nations where fatalities from quakes are excessive and where levels of corruption are above average.

Bilham said in an interview with Postmedia News that there are uncertainties in the study, since many factors contribute to shoddy building construction.

"The biggest uncertainty in the study was in distinguishing between ignorance, corruption and poverty," he said, explaining how all three factors are at play.

He says corruption is "endemic" in Haiti. But when you look at the buildings that collapsed, he says it is apparent they were put up by "people who didn't know what they were doing."

"And even if they did know what they were doing, they didn't have the money to do anything better," he says. "And the government didn't have the will power to impose on them some kind of code that would have prevented this kind of disaster."

Given the attention and international expertise now focused on Haiti, he says he expects structures built as part of the reconstruction effect will withstand future quakes.

But Bilham says a concerted international effort is needed to reduce the risk posed by buildings in other quake prone countries, such as Jamaica, Pakistan, Peru, Turkey and Iran. In Tehran, Iran's capital, Bilham has estimated one million people could die in a quake similar to the one in Haiti last year.

He is calling on the United Nations to create an "engineering inspection force" to identify dangerous structures, introduce and enforce building codes and stamp out corruption by requiring inspections be done at every step in the construction process.

Bilham says engineers and seismologists know how to build safe buildings.

"The problem is none of the information is trickling down to people that die," he says. "As we speak people are building houses they will die in from earthquakes."