SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic —Rescue teams struggled in the
early morning darkness Wednesday to make their way through the rubble of
collapsed buildings after a devastating earthquake struck Haiti late Tuesday afternoon.
The quake, with a magnitude estimated at 7.0, caused the
collapse of the National Palace, leveled countless shantytown dwellings and
brought more suffering to a nation that was already the hemisphere’s poorest
and most disaster-prone.
The earthquake was the worst in the region in more than 200
years and left the country in a shambles. As night fell in Port-au-Prince,
Haiti’s densely populated capital, fires burned near the shoreline downtown,
but otherwise the city fell into darkness.
The electricity remained out during the early hours Wednesday
and telephones were not working. It was not immediately clear how badly the
Port-au-Prince airport had been damaged and if it would be able to handle
aircraft bringing relief aid from overseas.
In the chaos, it was not possible for officials to determine how
many people had been killed and injured, but they warned that the casualties
could be substantial.
Louise Ivers, the clinical director of the aid group Partners in
Health, said in an e-mail to her colleagues: “Port-au-Prince is
devastated, lot of deaths. SOS. SOS . . . Temporary field hospital by us at
UNDP needs supplies, pain meds, bandages. Please help us.”
The headquarters of the United Nations mission collapsed, the United Nations
said in a statement, and many employees were missing.
“We know there will be casualties but we cannot give figures for
the time being,” Alain Le Roy, the chief of U.N. peacekeeping forces, told The Associated Press in New York.
A hospital collapsed in Pétionville, a hillside district in
Port-au-Prince that is home to many diplomats and wealthy Haitians, a
videographer for The Associated Press said. An American government official
also reported seeing houses that had tumbled into a ravine.
Tequila Minsky, a photographer who was in Port-au-Prince, said a
wall at the front of the Hotel Oloffson had fallen, killing a passer-by. A
number of nearby buildings had crumbled, trapping people, she said, and a
Unibank bank building was badly damaged. People were screaming.
“It was general mayhem,” Ms. Minksy said.
The earthquake struck just before 5 p.m. about 10 miles
southwest of Port-au-Prince, the United States Geological Survey said. Many aftershocks followed and more
were expected, said David Wald, a Geological Survey seismologist.
“The main issue here will probably be shaking,” he said, “and
this is an area that is particularly vulnerable in terms of construction
practice, and with a high population density. There could be a high number of
casualties.”
Oxfam, the antipoverty group, said that Kristie van de Wetering,
a former employee based in Port-au-Prince, had described houses in rubble
everywhere.
“There is a blanket of dust rising from the valley south of the
capital,” agency officials said Ms. van de Wetering had told them. “We can hear
people calling for help from every corner. The aftershocks are ongoing and
making people very nervous.”
The earthquake could be felt across the border in the Dominican
Republic, on the eastern part of the island of Hispaniola. High-rise buildings
in the capital, Santo Domingo, shook and sent people streaming down stairways into
the streets, fearing that the tremor could intensify.
Haiti sits on a large fault that has caused catastrophic quakes
in the past, but this one was described as among the most powerful to hit the
region. With many poor residents living in tin-roof shacks that sit
precariously on steep ravines and with much of the construction in
Port-au-Prince and elsewhere in the country of questionable quality, the
expectation was that the quake caused major damage to buildings and significant
loss of life.
Haiti’s many man-made woes — its dire poverty, political
infighting and proclivity for insurrection — have been exacerbated repeatedly
by natural disasters. At the end of 2008, four hurricanes flooded whole towns, knocked out bridges
and left a destitute population in even more desperate conditions.
The United States and other countries have devoted significant
humanitarian support to Haiti, financing a large United Nations peacekeeping mission that has recently reported major
gains in controlling crime. International aid has also supported an array of
organizations aimed at raising the country’s dismal health and education
levels.
Emergency meetings were being held in Washington, and President Obama issued a statement saying that
administration officials were closely monitoring the situation.
“We stand ready to assist the people of Haiti,” Mr. Obama said.
The Caribbean is not usually considered a seismic danger zone,
but earthquakes have struck here in the past.
“There’s a history of large, devastating earthquakes,” said Paul
Mann, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas, “but they’re separated by hundreds of
years.” Most of Haiti lies on the Gonave microplate, a sliver of the earth’s
crust between the much larger North American plate to the north and the
Caribbean plate to the south. The earthquake on Tuesday occurred when what
appears to be part of the southern fault zone broke and slid.
The fault is similar in structure to the San Andreas fault that
slices through California, Dr. Mann said.
Such earthquakes, which are called strike-slip, tend to be shallow
and produce violent shaking at the surface.
“They can be very devastating, especially when there are cities
nearby,” Dr. Mann said.
Victor Tsai, a seismologist at the National Earthquake
Information Center of the United States Geological
Survey,
said the depth of Tuesday’s earthquake was only about six miles and the quake
was a 9 on a 1-to-10 scale that measures ground shaking. “We expect substantial
damage from this event,” he said.
Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s ambassador to the United States, said in
an interview on CNN that he had little information about the extent of damage
but said the suffering inflicted on the was likely to be “catastrophic.”
Mr. Joseph said that the one official he had reached —
identified by The Associated Press as President Rene Preval’s chief of staff, Fritz Longchamp — told him that houses
had crumbled “on the right side of the street and the left side of the street.”
Elsie St. Louis-Accilien, the director of the Haitian Americans
United for Progress in Queens, N.Y., said that she was able to reach the
director of Ofatma hospital, in Port-au-Prince. “They are trapped inside,” Ms.
St. Louis-Accilien said in a telephone interview. “They were pretty shaken, but
they were relieved to be alive.”
She said that the director said that there was “a lot of smoke,
a lot of dust,” and that her phone has been ringing nonstop. “People are
calling me, elected officials are calling, asking what we can do.”