A recent spate of earthquakes with wide-ranging levels of destruction highlights the many factors that play into survival and eventual recovery. From Haitians still far from normalcy after a magnitude 7.0 in January to Sumatrans unscathed by a 7.8 on Wednesday, its clear that earthquake impact is a volatile mix of earth, social, and economic whimsy.

The January 12 Haiti earthquake was more than twice as deadly as any previous 7.0 event, according to University of Colorado seismologist Roger Bilham. Bilham, writing in the journal Nature, points out one obvious reason for this enhanced damage:

“The buildings had been doomed during their construction,” he stated. “Every possible mistake was evident: brittle steel, coarse non-angular aggregate, weak cement mixed with dirty or salty sand, and the widespread termination of steel reinforcement rods at the joints between columns and floors of buildings where earthquake stresses are highest.”

Bilham rests the responsibility for the estimated 230,000 deaths, 1.5 million homeless, and countless injuries on “decades of unsupervised construction permitted by a government oblivious to its plate-boundary location.”

“In recent earthquakes, buildings have acted as weapons of mass destruction,” Bilham wrote. “It is time to formulate plans for a new United Nations mission—teams of inspectors to ensure that people do not construct buildings designed to kill their occupants.”

While Bilham points to failure at the juncture of the physical and political, others see the tremendous degradation of the natural environment as equally problematic.

“You and virtually all others talk about Haiti's recovery as though it were just a matter of better government and housing,” former Woods Hole Research Center Director George M. Woodwell wrote in a personal communication to the Natural Hazards Center. “The very first requirement…is a sustaining and stable environment: a landscape that works to sustain life. A place for a government to stand and to build an economy.”

Without such sustainability, Woodwell points out in a lengthy post on his The Nature of Our House blog, improvements in the systems that allowed the destruction in the first place will tend toward future entropy. Instead, he posits, Haiti must look to rebuilding its ecological wealth.

“The first step for Haiti and for the world is to separate the scientific and technical from the social, economic and political: to ask the question ‘What will work?’ in an ecological and biological sense without, at least initially, involving social mechanisms or political or economic processes,” he writes. “Once the biophysical goals are clear, economic and political action has potential. Without clear biophysical goals, economic and political methods will founder....and will always founder.”

That’s not to say social structures such as insurance plans and building codes don’t have an important role to play. In other areas of the world, earthquakes of similar magnitude have wrought far less destruction in terms of both human life and monetary damage.

The 8.8 earthquake that struck Chile February 27 moved the city of Concepción about 10 feet to the west and shifted the earth’s axis enough to make each day 1.26 microseconds shorter, according to a CNN report on measurements by several university teams and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Even so, it was not as damaging as the less powerful Haitian quake, because of what the insurance company Swiss Re called “the highly advanced anti-seismic construction standards in Chile.”

Although the death toll topped 700, preliminary damage estimates issued by Swiss Re in early March put insured losses from the Chile quake at $4 to $7 billion. The tendency of Chileans to be insured, earthquake aware, and live in seismically sound structures certainly limited the damage.

According to one researcher, it’s higher per capita gross domestic product that really makes a difference in who lives and who dies in earthquakes.

A 2005 study by UCLA Institute of the Environment Professor Matthew Kahn found that 65 percent of disaster deaths from 1989 to 1999 happened in countries with a GDP of less than $760 per capita, according to a U.S. News and World Report article. After accounting for factors such as disaster prevalence and severity, Kahn still found that vulnerability to disaster shakes out to dollars and cents.

"In Chile, we know that they had better building codes," Kahn told the magazine. "A richer guy can afford a home built from better materials. In Haiti, many houses were built with cruddy materials."