is it just me or does anyone esle think it's strange that the Dominican Republic does not appear to have had the same earthquake. they both share the same Island and looking at a map Port o pronce appears to be less then 50 Km from the border?

Not really. As I understand it there is little population located close to the Haiti border on the Dominican side due to the geography. I suspect therefore that their will be people located in the Dominican Republic whom have been affected but they will be rural communities and as such loss of life, if any, will be minimal. Earthquakes victims are mostly located in large population centres and the Dominican does not have any close the border and the epicentre of Port-au-Prince . If you also couple this with Haiti being very poor in comparison to all it's neighbours, with the possible exception of Cuba, it has sub-standard construction, housing and buildings in general are not very good. So lots of population close to the epicentre in poor buildings... huge loss of life unfortunately.

There are a number of factors at play. Thanks to decades of dictatorship followed by ineffectual and corrupt government, buildings are more run down in Haiti than in popular tourist destination the Dominican Republic and, hence, more likely to collapse. The major population centres of Dominica are at the other end of the island whereas a really massive quake struck right below Port-au-Princes, one of the most densely populated cities on earth.

There are plenty of other reason which are detailed in [url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/15/forces-working-against-haitithis article[/url. Pat Robertson was, dare I suggest, talking out of his backside.

Firstly, this was a shallow epi-centre quake, just 8km or so below the surface, which made it very destructive, but affects the decay of intensity with distance. Secondly, the epicentre was beneath a point about 15km from Port au Prince, in the other direction from the border with the Dominican Republic. Given the distance decay, the 60 or so km from the epicentre of a shallow earthquake to the border is quite a long way. Thirdly, the region of Dominica on that border is largely rural. To have mass devastation in an earthquake you need a large amount of suitably flimsy building stock, as it is building collapse which kills, not the quake itself. Santo Domingo, for example (about a quarter of the Dominican Republic's population) is more like 250km away from the epicentre.

Very interesting article that John... thanks for posting link.

Thank you all for explaining it also answers another question I had which was why concentrate on repairing the Habour at Port o prince as opposed to shipping why the undamaged facilities in the Dominican republic I would assume from the previous comments there is no easy access thought the border.

It was God what did it, he gets annoyed with us sometimes

dominican is an absolute shi*hole and haiti is, apparently, ten times worse

The border is basically a big massive mountain range, so not ideal for land based transport of goods.

My mate was in Puerto Plata<DominicanRepublic> when the quake happened,he said that they could feel the quake

He probably just farted.