Cleanup cost from Haiti earthquake

I was struck by this NYT article stating that just the cost of debris removal in Haiti is estimated at $1B

By late summer, however, the need to tackle the earthquake damage directly became so glaring that some initial steps were taken. The government tendered its very first cleanup contract to Mr. Perkins’s Haiti Recovery Group. Worth $7.5 million to $13.5 million — nobody would be more precise — the contract represented a minuscule piece of a debris removal operation expected to cost $1.2 billion.

This is an incredible sum, when you consider that income for the entire country is about $7B



The cost of cleanup is just what is paid for the removal of damaged property and excludes the value of the lost assets and lost revenue due to the destruction of assets.