Injured Haitians plead for help after quake

PORT-AU-PRINCE – Haitians piled bodies along the devastated streets of their capital yesterday after the strongest earthquake hit the poor Caribbean nation in more than 200 years crushed thousands of structures, from humble shacks to the National Palace and the United Nations peacekeeping headquarters. Untold numbers were still trapped.

Destroyed communications made it impossible to tell the extent of destruction from Tuesday afternoon’s 7.0-magnitude tremor, or to estimate how many were dead among the collapsed buildings in Haiti’s capital of about two million people.France’s foreign minister said the head of the UN peacekeeping mission was apparently among the dead.International Red Cross spokesman Paul Conneally said an estimated three million people may have been affected by the quake and that it would take a day or two for a clear picture of the damage to emerge. Clouds of dust thrown up by falling buildings choked Port-au-Prince for hours.The United States and other nations began organising aid efforts, alerting search teams and gathering supplies that will be badly needed in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. The international Red Cross and other aid groups announced plans for major relief operations.’Haiti has moved to centre of the world’s thoughts and the world’s compassion,’ said British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.Associated Press journalists based in Port-au-Prince found the damage staggering even for a country long accustomed to tragedy and disaster.Aftershocks rattled the city 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.People pulled bodies from collapsed homes, covering them with sheets by the side of the road. Passersby lifted the sheets to see if a loved one was underneath. Outside a crumbled building the bodies of five children and three adults lay in a pile.It was clear tens of thousands lost their homes and many perished in collapsed buildings that were flimsy and dangerous even under normal conditions.’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.’An Associated Press videographer saw a wrecked hospital where people screamed for help in Petionville, a hillside Port-au-Prince district that is home to many diplomats and wealthy Haitians as well as the poor.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. She said her family was inside.UN peacekeepers, many of whom are from Brazil, were distracted from aid efforts by their own tragedy: Many spent the night hunting for survivors in the ruins of their headquarters.The quake struck at 16h53, centres 15 kilometres west of Port-au-Prince at a depth of only eight kilometres, the US Geological Survey said. USGS geophysicist Kristin Marano called it the strongest earthquake since 1770 in what is now Haiti.Most of Haiti’s nine million people are desperately poor, and after years of political instability the country has no real construction standards. In November 2008, following the collapse of a school in Petionville, the mayor of Port-au-Prince estimated about 60 per cent of buildings were shoddily built and unsafe in normal circumstances. – Nampa-AP