The earthquake that devastated Haiti

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 18 September 2021

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2010 the Haitian capital and surrounding areas were hit by a catastrophic earthquake. Much of Port Au Prince was flattened and more than a hundred thousand people were killed. Amid the destruction and death people's first instinct was to pull together and help one another. A survivor describes what happened after his family home collapsed around him. Plus, a prisoner who took part in the dramatic Attica prison uprising of 1971, the professor who used DNA to unravel a 200-year-old royal mystery from France, and one of the first settlers of Copenhagen's famous hippy commune, Christiania.

Photo: Men gather to try to reach those still buried in the rubble beneath the Haitian Department of Justice building in January 2010.(Photo by Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson.
0:05.0	History as told by the people who were there.
0:08.1	This week it's the 50th anniversary of the Attica Prison siege in the US.
0:12.8	The police was on the roof.
0:14.8	All they was doing was sighting and guns.
0:17.0	Pointing their guns at you?
0:18.4	Yeah, I felt like these guys was trying to kill me.
0:22.0	Also, we've got the professor who used DNA to unravel a 200-year-old royal mystery from France.
0:28.0	Plus, we'll look at the early years of the famous Christiania hippie colony in Copenhagen.
0:33.2	You had all those characters like guys who just came out of prison and needed a place to live.
0:38.6	Vietnam to Serters, you know, that was during the Vietnam War.
0:41.8	We came from all parts of walks of life and
0:44.4	Professor Peter of the Peter principle on why so many people are bad at their jobs
0:49.5	competence is essentially eligibility for promotion and incompetence is a bar to
0:55.9	promotion. Wherever those rules apply people will rise to their level of incompetence and
1:00.8	tend to stay there. That's all coming up later in the podcast and for all these stories our witness history team will guide our contributors through their first hand recollections.
1:10.0	And we're starting in Haiti with the heartbreaking story of the earthquake that devastated the
1:15.2	Caribbean country in 2010, killing thousands of people.
1:19.0	Zach Brophy has been looking into this one for us, Zach.
1:21.6	Yeah, Hi Max, many of our listeners may actually be more familiar with two big recent news stories
1:26.5	that have come out of Haiti, one of which was an earthquake which was quickly followed
1:31.8	by a hurricane in early August
	...

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