A 6.8-magnitude earthquake hit East Africa about five hours ago. The epicenter was in the Great Rift Valley along Lake Tanganyika, southwest of Kalemie, DRC. No one is yet sure how many people died in Kalemie - some reports say no one died, others say there are definitely deaths. Kalemie is in Katanga province, which is directly south of the southernmost province in which I work. There's a slideshow of pictures mostly from Nairobi here.The earthquake was strong enough to be felt in Nairobi (and to cause workers to evacuate the skyscrapers), so I'm sure that many of my friends in Bukavu and Goma in the DRC have been affected by this already. Please take a moment to say a prayer for them and for the thousands who live in refugee camps along the lake today.
The problem with living in a place where the state's authority has collapsed is that every problem, large or small, is magnified. When something like this happens in San Francisco, for example, it's bad, but we also see a very quick response from authorities to rescue those who are trapped, stop traffic onto collapsed bridges, and get the power grid working again. In a place like the DRC, though, the already-bad infrastructure coupled with a very limited capacity to respond means that people suffer on a much greater scale. Transportation infrastructure and communications are also in pretty bad shape, which hampers efforts to gather information and help survivors. If you look at the map, for example, it's not really that far from Bukavu to Kalemie, but it probably takes two days to cover that distance if you're going over land.
I don't expect that this will affect my trip to the region very much, although if buildings have collapsed in Bukavu, that will make things more complicated. What's more worrying is the indication of increased seismic activity in this part of the Great Rift Valley. There have been recent indications that Nyiragongo, the active Virguna volcano at Goma, might erupt soon. I don't remember a lot from my "Earthquakes and Other Natural Disasters" (aka "Shake and Bake" course in college, but I do remember that there's a connection between earthquakes and volcanoes, especially when they're in the same area. But the odds that I'll be there when the volcano erupts are pretty slim. Let's hope.
(UNDP map)