Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said “well over” 100,000 people may have died in yesterday’s earthquake, as the United Nations and relief groups rushed aid to the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country.
Bellerive said he based his estimate on reports of the number of buildings that collapsed with people inside, adding that the extent of casualties is largely guesswork at this point. About 70,000 people were killed in the hemisphere’s worst earthquake on record, which hit Peru in 1970, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its Web site.
“I believe that we are well over 100,000. I hope that is not true because I hope people had the time to get out,” Bellerive said in a telephone interview with CNN. “We have so many people in the street and we don’t know exactly where they were living. But there are so many buildings, so many neighborhoods totally destroyed and in some neighborhoods we don’t even see people so I don’t know where those people are.”
President Rene Preval told the Miami Herald that the country was “destroyed” by the magnitude 7.0 temblor, which was centered 10 miles (16 kilometers) southwest of Port-au- Prince, a city of about 2 million, at 4:53 p.m. local time yesterday. The Associated Press said bodies are heaped along streets amid the rubble from thousands of collapsed structures. The corpses of small children were piled outside schools as flies began to gather, the AP said.
Preval told CNN in an interview at the airport that both the presidential palace and his private home collapsed.
UN Emergency Fund
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said he released $10 million from the world body’s emergency relief fund to speed aid to Haiti. He also asked the U.S. for heavy equipment and rescue teams. Promises of additional aid came from countries including the UK, Canada, Brazil, Germany and the Netherlands, which pledged 2 million euros ($2.9 million) in emergency aid.
President Barack Obama ordered U.S. agencies to undertake a “swift, coordinated” effort to get aid to Haiti. Search-and- rescue teams, four U.S. Coast Guard cutters and the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson are en route, while the administration works to account for U.S. government employees and citizens. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton extended a stopover in Hawaii on her way to Papua New Guinea to help coordinate the response.
The State Department set up a telephone hotline at +1-888- 407-4747 for citizens seeking information on relatives and friends.
Rubble in Roads
“Buildings have collapsed everywhere and there is rubble blocking the roads,” Sophie Perez, the director of the relief organization CARE, said in a statement.
The UN said clean water is in short supply and that “hotels, hospitals, schools and the national penitentiary have all suffered extensive damage.”
UN Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Alain LeRoy said 14 UN workers in Haiti were confirmed dead, and that 150 civilian and military personnel are unaccounted for.
Economic damage may be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, according to estimates from Eqecat Inc., an Oakland, California-based company that builds financial risk models to help insurers prepare for catastrophes. Eqecat estimated that as many as 2 million people may be affected by the earthquake and aftershocks.
Delta Air Lines Inc. and AMR Corp.’s American Airlines both suspended service indefinitely after the quake left the Port-au- Prince air-traffic control tower out of commission, company spokesmen said.
Dollar a Day
Haiti’s population of 9.6 million has a per capita income of about $560, with 54 percent of Haitians living on less than $1 a day and 78 percent on less than $2 daily, according to the World Bank. The gross domestic product was $7 billion in 2008. The country is still recovering from four tropical storms or hurricanes that killed at least 800 people in 2008.
“For a country and a people who are no strangers to hardship and suffering, this tragedy seems especially cruel and incomprehensible,” Obama said today.
The apparel sector accounts for about two-thirds of Haiti’s exports and nearly one-tenth of the nation’s economy, according to data from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Remittances are the primary source of foreign exchange, equaling nearly a quarter of gross domestic product and more than twice the earnings from exports such as coffee and mangoes, the CIA said.
Pope Benedict XVI appealed to “everyone’s generosity” in a call for financial aid for Haiti today in Rome. The body of Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot, 63, was found in the ruins of his office in Port-au-Prince, said the Rev. Pierre Le Beller of the Saint Jacques Missionary Center in Landivisiau, France, according to the AP.
World Bank Aid
The heads of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund said they are prepared to assess damage and provide aid. World Bank offices in Port-au-Prince “were destroyed but most staff have been safely accounted for,” the bank’s president, Robert Zoellick, said in a statement.
Citigroup Inc.’s three-story office building in the capital collapsed and the bank is trying to account for its 44 employees, said Liliana Mejia, a spokeswoman for the New York- based bank. Bank of Nova Scotia, Canada’s third-largest bank by assets, said all 80 of its employees in Haiti are safe and accounted for.
Brazil, which has 1,266 troops in Haiti to support UN peacekeeping, said 11 service members are dead and seven missing.
Florida Governor
Florida Governor Charlie Crist authorized the state’s emergency management office to provide food, water, tents, blankets, cots and other equipment from its stockpile of hurricane supplies.
“We maintain a warehouse of supplies for disasters in Orlando that could be made available and we’re ready to roll if needed,” said spokesman Mike Stone.
In New York City, home to about 120,000 temporary and permanent Haitian immigrants, Mayor Michael Bloomberg called upon residents to send money to the Red Cross or to the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, a city-administered charity, to aid in the relief efforts. The mayor is founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.
A school with children in its rooms collapsed in Port-au- Prince, according to the UN Children’s Fund, Unicef. The aid group Doctors Without Borders, or Medecins sans Frontieres, said in a statement that its 60-bed hospital in Port-au-Prince was seriously damaged.
More than 100 workers from Unicef in Haiti are helping the injured and providing for children separated from their parents, said Caryl Stern, the president of the U.S. fund of Unicef in New York.
“It’s a really densely populated area. It couldn’t be worse,” said Stern, who has been in contact with Unicef workers in Haiti. “It’s going to take a big world effort.”
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