Despite their usefulness in providing a tool to compare earthquake severity, intensity scales have significant drawbacks. These scales are based on effects (largely destruction) that depend not only on the severity of ground shaking but also on factors such as building design and the nature of surface materials. For example, the modest 7.0-magnitude 2010 Haiti earth- quake mentioned earlier was extremely destructive, mainly because of inferior building practices. Thus, the destruction wrought by an earthquake is frequently not a good measure of i the amount of energy that was unleashed.