People walk along a street lined with buildings, which were destroyed after a major earthquake struck, in Port-au-Prince in this January 12, 2010 video grab. [Agencies]
The quake struck at 4:53 pm, centered just 10 miles (15 kilometers) west of Port-au-Prince at a depth of only 5 miles (8 kilometers), the US Geological Survey said. USGS geophysicist Kristin Marano called it the strongest earthquake since 1770 in what is now Haiti.
The temblor appeared to have occurred along a strike-slip fault, where one side of a vertical fault slips horizontally past the other, said Tom Jordan, a quake expert at the University of Southern California.
Most of Haiti's 9 million people are desperately poor, and after years of political instability the country has no real construction standards. In November 2008, following the collapse of a school in Petionville, the mayor of Port-au-Prince estimated about 60 percent of buildings were shoddily built and unsafe in normal circumstances.
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