It is rather sad news to hear that the construction in the Dominican Republic might not be much better than what was found in Haiti. Most reports have stated that people in the Dominican Republic have a generally higher standard of living than people living in Haiti. But it sounds like that is not true for their building safety.

With that tremendous strain release (earthquake) in the Haiti fault zone last January I would expect that there was a lot of strain transferred to Dominican Republic fault zones. So any approaching earthquake for that area could conceivably be accelerated by tens or perhaps hundreds of years. Also, the shockwave from the Haiti earthquake might have helped destabilized some of the Dominican Republic area fault zone rock layers.