'Total Disaster And Chaos' In Haiti
A father carries his daughter in Haiti's capital city of Port-au-Prince after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Tuesday.
Haitians were desperately trying to dig out Wednesday after the devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake that shook the capital of Port-au-Prince, causing massive destruction.
The full extent of the damage remains unclear with most communications lines down to the Caribbean island, but as many as 3 million people may have been affected by the quake, according to estimates by the International Federation of the Red Cross.
Epicenter Of The Earthquake
Haitian President Rene Preval called it a "catastrophe" and said that he believed the death toll stretched into the thousands.
"Parliament has collapsed. The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed,'' he told the Miami Herald on Wednesday. "There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them.''
Bracing for the casualties, relief groups scrambled to contact their staff members and arrange for international aid deliveries. The U.S. government mobilized Coast Guard cutters and aircraft to be ready to deliver humanitarian assistance. U.S. officials reported bodies lying in the streets and an aid official described "total disaster and chaos."
The airport in Port-au-Prince was operational following the quake, according to U.S. officials, who said they hoped aid would start arriving later Wednesday.
Complete NPR Coverage
Heard On 'Morning Edition':
President Obama called the disaster "truly heart-wrenching" and promised a "swift, coordinated and aggressive effort" to save lives and deliver aid to Haiti.
"For a country and a people who are no strangers to hardship and suffering, this tragedy seems especially cruel and incomprehensible," said Obama, who added that relief efforts would be "complex and challenging."
But aftershocks continued to rattle the capital as women covered in dust clawed out of debris, wailing. Stunned people wandered the streets holding hands. Thousands gathered in public squares long after nightfall, singing hymns.
As dawn broke, Haitians piled bodies along the rubble-covered streets, covering the corpses with sheets. The dead reportedly included Joseph Serge Miot, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Port-au-Prince, whose body was found in the ruins of his office.
At a destroyed four-story apartment building, a girl of about 16 stood atop a car trying to peer inside while several men pulled at a foot sticking from rubble. The girl said her family was inside.
"The hospitals cannot handle all these victims," Dr. Louis-Gerard Gilles, a former senator, said as he helped survivors. "Haiti needs to pray. We all need to pray together."
The Two-Way Blog
Magalie Boyer, a staffer for World Vision, an international aid group, was in the capital during the quake.
"Port-au Prince is a city of walls, and you know the walls came tumbling down around the World Vision office," she told NPR. "Cars were stuck and could not get anywhere. Trees fell. A couple of buildings collapsed. Roofs were no longer horizontal. There were extensive signs of damage."
The reports trickling in offered alarming hints about the extent of the damage to one of the world's poorest nations. Rickety shantytowns lay in ruins, while the ornate National Palace, one of the more substantial buildings in the capital, crumbled.
"There are people injured in the palace,'' Fritz Longchamp, the building's executive director, told the Miami Herald. "I'm calling for help and medical assistance for them."
The headquarters of the United Nations peacekeeping mission also collapsed. Fewer than five people have been confirmed killed in the collapse, although more than 100 people are still believed to be missing in the rubble. Separate reports suggested that as many as a dozen peacekeepers were killed and scores were missing. Other U.N. troops, mostly from Brazil, frantically combed the wreckage looking for survivors.
"The main building that was the headquarters building has collapsed," Alain Le Roy, the U.N. peacekeeping chief said late Tuesday. "We know clearly it is a tragedy for Haiti, and a tragedy for the U.N., and especially for the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti."
This image obtained from Twitter purportedly shows Haitians standing amid rubble in Port-au-Prince after a huge earthquake Tuesday.
"There will be casualties, but we cannot give figures for the time being," Le Roy said.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told French radio Wednesday that he believed that the U.N.'s peacekeeping chief in Haiti, Hedi Annabi, a Tunisian diplomat, was killed when the building collapsed. U.N. officials could not confirm reports that Annabi had died.
Elsewhere in Port-au-Prince, a young American aid worker was trapped for about 10 hours under the rubble of her mission house before she was rescued by her husband, who told CBS'The Early Show that he drove 100 miles to the capital to find her after he learned of the quake.
Frank Thorp said he dug for more than an hour to free his wife, Jillian, and a co-worker, from under about a foot of concrete.
The earthquake hit at 4:53 p.m. local time, near the end of the regular workday. Centered only 10 miles away from the capital, it was the strongest earthquake since 1770 in what is now Haiti, according to Kristin Marano, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
It was a shallow quake, only about six miles deep. Thomas Jordan, head of the Southern California Earthquake Center, says the temblor started along a fault that lies between two giant tectonic plates: the Caribbean and North American plates.
U.S. diplomats in Port-au-Prince were still trying to get a handle on the scale of the disaster.
"They reported structures down. They reported a lot of walls down," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Tuesday night. "They did see a number of bodies in the street and on the sidewalk that had been hit by debris. So clearly, there's going to be serious loss of life in this." State Department officials said Wednesday that they have been able to account for all U.S. personnel except for one, and that they remain concerned about Haitian employees of the U.S. Embassy.
People walk past a crushed car and rubble in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, after a major earthquake hit the island nation Tuesday.
Obama named U.S. Agency for International Development administrator Rajiv Shah to coordinate American relief efforts. USAID was sending a team of experts that was scheduled to arrive in Haiti on Wednesday afternoon, while search-and-rescue teams from Virginia, Florida and California were also en route.
Haiti will need all the help it can get. Most of Haiti's 9 million people are desperately poor, and the country has been wracked by years of political instability.
Decades of violence culminated in a bloody rebellion in 2004 that prompted the deployment of a U.N. peacekeeping force that now includes 7,000 troops and an additional 2,000 international police.
Crime has since decreased somewhat, due to the presence of the U.N. troops and the rebuilding of the country's own police force.
But Haiti has limited capability to address such a widespread disaster.
Elizabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman for the U.N.'s humanitarian office, said it was working with independent aid agency Telecoms Sans Frontieres to get phone lines working again — a key element in organizing relief efforts.
Venezuela's government said it would send a military plane with canned foods, medicine and drinking water and provide 50 rescue workers. Mexico, which suffered an earthquake in 1985 that killed some 10,000 people, planned to send doctors, search and rescue dogs and infrastructure damage experts.
Italy said it was sending a C-130 cargo plane Wednesday with a field hospital and emergency medical personnel as well as a team to assess aid needs. France said 65 clearing specialists with six sniffer dogs, as well as two doctors and two nurses were preparing to depart.
Haitians living outside the country frantically tried to contact relatives on the island throughout the night.
Edwidge Danticat, an award-winning Haitian-American author, has been unable to contact relatives in Haiti. She sat with family and friends at her home in Miami, looking for news on the Internet and watching TV news reports.
"You want to go there, but you just have to wait," she said. "Life is already so fragile in Haiti, and to have this on such a massive scale, it's unimaginable how the country will be able to recover from this."
NPR's Kevin Whitelaw, Michele Kelemen and Christopher Joyce and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122502289&ft=1&f=1004
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar