Haitians piled heaps of lifeless bodies along the streets of their capital Wednesday after a massive earthquake wrecked thousands of structures. Untold numbers were still trapped. The Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation is devastated.
The earthquake which came on Tuesday afternoon was a magnitude-7.0. It was the biggest earthquake to happen in the Caribbean in 200 years.
President Rene Preval said in a panic:
“Parliament has collapsed. The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed…there are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them.”
The Roman Catholic archbishop of Port-au-Prince was counted among the dead, and the head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission is still missing.
The Red Cross said a third of Haiti’s 9 million people will need emergency aid and it will take a couple of days for a clear picture of the damage to emerge.
Nations from all over the world are sending aid to the small island nation.
As aftershocks continued to rattle, people pulled bodies from collapsed homes, and covered them with sheets by the side of the road. Passers-by lifted the sheets to check if their loved ones were underneath.
Preval said that Haiti’s Senate president was among those trapped alive inside the Parliament building.
An American aid worker was trapped for about 10 hours under the rubble of her mission house before being rescued by her husband, who drove 100 miles (160 kilometers) to Port-au-Prince to find her. Frank Thorp said he dug for more than an hour to free his wife, Jillian, and a co-worker, from beneath a foot of concrete.
An estimated 40,000-45,000 Americans live in Haiti, and the U.S. Embassy had no confirmed reports of deaths among its citizens.
The U.N.’s 9,000 peacekeepers in Haiti, many of whom are from Brazil, were distracted away from aid efforts by their own tragedy: Many spent the night searching for survivors in the ruins of their headquarters.
The quake struck at 4:53 p.m., centered 10 miles (15 kilometers) west of Port-au-Prince at a depth of 5 miles (8 kilometers). U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) geophysicist Kristin Marano called it the strongest earthquake since 1770 in the area.
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