A magnitude 5.0 earthquake struck southern Haiti in 2024, damaging homes and infrastructure in communities still recovering from the catastrophic August 2021 earthquake that had killed over 2,200 people. While smaller than the 2021 event, the tremor caused significant damage in areas where construction had not yet been restored to pre-earthquake standards and where families were living in transitional structures vulnerable to seismic activity.
The earthquake struck communities already overwhelmed by the security crisis, food insecurity, and displacement that had been accumulating for years. Emergency responders who might in better circumstances have rapidly assessed damage and deployed assistance found their capacity constrained by the same security and resource limitations affecting all humanitarian operations in Haiti.
Geologists monitoring Haiti’s seismic situation noted that the country sits on active fault lines and that moderate-to-large earthquakes are a recurring geological reality that Haiti’s vulnerable building stock and limited institutional response capacity made particularly dangerous. The 2021 earthquake had demonstrated once again that building standards, early warning, and emergency response capacity needed to be fundamentally improved — improvements that the ongoing political and security crisis had prevented from being implemented.
International seismic risk organizations called for renewed investment in earthquake preparedness in Haiti, arguing that the country’s vulnerability to seismic events was a predictable risk that could be reduced through building standards enforcement, community preparedness training, and improved emergency response capacity. In the current crisis environment, these investments were impossible to make, but the need for them only grew with each passing month.