IT STARTED with a strange noise that I mistook for machinery, perhaps an electrical generator.
At 6am yesterday, Haiti was rocked by the worst aftershock since the earthquake that killed up to 200,000 souls and displaced 1.5 million people on January 12th.
This one, I would learn a few hours later, measured 6.1 on the Richter scale, compared to just over 7 for the cataclysm of eight days before.
But I wasn’t thinking about magnitudes or Richter scales as my room, on the third and top floor of the Kinam hotel in Pétionville, on the heights above Port-au-Prince, began to move. The mind works rationally at such moments.
The Kinam is an old, Caribbean-style, wooden gingerbread building, and I remembered a Haitian woman telling me that concrete buildings are safe for hurricanes but death traps in earthquakes, whereas wood is safer in earthquakes but offers no protection against hurricanes.
Lesson number one, I thought: you’re lucky to be in a wooden building.
Two: What should I do? I was dressing to go to down to breakfast when the tremor started, and mentally ran through the options. I could run on to the landing and downstairs, but that would put me in the courtyard of the U-shaped hotel, which might fall on me.
Better to stay on the top floor, where it would be easier to dig me out if the building collapsed.
I grew up in California, where earthquakes are a frequent occurrence. My childhood education kicked in. Seek shelter under a table or a heavy piece of furniture, or failing that, a door jamb.
So I stood between bathroom and bedroom, watching the walls sway back and forth, and I swear I felt seasick. Time seemed to stop. It lasted perhaps 30 seconds, certainly less than a minute.
But it felt much longer. I didn’t expect to die, but I feared being pinned under wreckage.
A short, eerie silence followed the tremor, then screams from the Place Saint-Pierre across the street, where hundreds of homeless Haitians are living.
Until yesterday I didn’t share the Haitians’ fear of aftershocks. Even those whose houses were unscathed by the first quake prefer to sleep in the street rather than risk death or entombment in further tremors.
On Haitian radio, “experts” tell us aftershocks are a good thing, because they relieve pressure on tectonic plates.
One seismologist has sown panic in the north by predicting an imminent quake measuring more than 8 on the Richter scale in Cap-Haitien, Haiti’s second city.