Haiti’s Prime Minister has warned the death toll may top 100,000 in a calamitous earthquake which left streets strewn with corpses and thousands missing in a scene of utter carnage.
Hospitals collapsed, destroyed schools were full of dead and the cries of trapped victims escaped from crushed buildings in the centre of the capital Port-au-Prince.
Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said the final death toll from the 7.0 quake could be “well over 100,000,” as an international aid effort geared up in a race against time to pull survivors from the ruins.
“I hope that is not true, because I hope the people had the time to get out. Because we have so much people on the streets right now, we don’t know exactly where they were living,” Bellerive said.
“But so many, so many buildings, so many neighbourhoods totally destroyed, and some neighbourhoods we don’t even see people, so I don’t know where those people are.”
President Rene Preval painted a scene of complete destruction in his impoverished Caribbean nation after the quake struck on Tuesday.
“Parliament has collapsed. The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed,” he said, estimating the number of dead in the thousands.
“There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them,” he said, as experts spoke of the worst quake to hit the disaster-prone nation in more than a century.
With hospitals also having crumbled in the fury of the quake, medical services were struggling to cope with the flow of wounded.
There are “tens of thousands of victims and considerable damage,” Haiti’s ambassador to the Organization of American States Duly Brutus said, without specifying the number of dead.
“The most urgent need is to help the thousands of people who are still alive and trapped in the ruins,” he added, saying the last quake of such magnitude to strike Haiti was in 1842.
Preval’s wife, First Lady Elisabeth Preval, told a US daily she had seen bodies in the streets of Port-au-Prince and had heard the cries of victims still trapped in the rubble of the parliament building.
“I’m stepping over dead bodies. A lot of people are buried under buildings. The general hospital has collapsed. We need support. We need help. We need engineers,” she said.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon said the capital, with its population of two million people had borne the brunt of the quake which struck at 4:53 pm (2153GMT), saying vast areas had been destroyed.
VIa ddinews.com
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