Ten years after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake turned parts of Port-au-Prince into a hellscape, reminders of the catastrophic event appear all over Haiti’s capital. Piles of rubble, half-standing buildings, and fraying aid tents are a visible reminder for a city that saw its population drop by roughly 500,000 people in the year after the earthquake.
But what may be the longest-lasting legacy of the earthquake lies a few miles to the northeast. Before 2010, the only occupants of those windswept hills were groups of goats scrounging for food amidst the arid landscape. Now the area is home to the country’s third largest city, Canaan.
This pair of natural-color Landsat images highlights the growth of Canaan after the earthquake. The left image shows the desolate, deforested land in 1986. The right image shows the city on February 24, 2020, after more than 200,000 people had moved there. The Thematic Mapper (TM) on Landsat 5 acquired the earlier image; the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 acquired the more recent image.
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Image via NASA Earth Observatory