Vers l'élaboration d'un plan opérationnel pour le pilotage des urgences et des crises associées à la matérialisation des risques majeurs dans les grandes villes d'Haïti, cas de la ville du Cap-Haïtien

Abstract

The city of Cap-Haitien, the second largest city in the Republic of Haiti, is threatened by natural and man-made disasters of great magnitude. Faced with the imminent danger that the occurrence of these disasters represents, it is of interest to offer the authorities a practical and adapted tool that can help them prepare an operational plan to manage the emergencies and crises that the major risks can generate. To achieve this, we first set the hypothesis that the existing tools on the Haitian territory will not allow to respond effectively to emergencies and crises that major events may generate. In order to verify the working hypothesis, field missions were carried out to learn about the real risks faced by the local population. The field visits were complemented by bibliographic research and field surveys. This methodology allowed us to draw up an inventory of priority risks in the city and to classify them according to their criticality. The methodology adopted also made it possible to inventory the key actors in risk management on the territory and to verify the operationalization of a contingency plan for hydroclimatic risks in the municipality of Cap-Haitian through a functional analysis approach.

As a result of this work, it is evident that the most feared risks are floods; earthquakes; cyclones; epidemics; episodes of prolonged drought; high winds; series of popular uprisings; tsunamis; human contamination; fires; landslides; terrorist acts; accidental explosions and collapses. The results of the work also confirm that the contingency plan studied has failures that can hinder the adequate response to the populations victims to the materialization of major risks. Based on these results, a guiding framework was proposed to guide decision makers in community risk management in the preparation of emergency and crisis response plans.