PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan15, (Reuters) -- As many as 200,000 people died in the earthquake that devastated Haiti and three-quarters of the capital, Port-au-Prince, will need to be rebuilt, authorities in the Caribbean country said on Friday.
“We have already collected around 50,000 dead bodies. We anticipate there will be between 100,000 and 200,000 dead in total, although we will never know the exact number,” Interior Minister Paul Antoine Bien-Aime told Reuters.
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| A woman prays and sings in a street in Port-au-Prince January 15. REUTERS |
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| People carry a coffin outside the morgue in Port-au-Prince January 15. REUTERS |
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| Looters flee after seeing a police patrol, January 15. AFP |
Some 40,000 bodies had been buried in mass graves, said Secretary of State for Public Safety Aramick Louis.
If the casualty figures turn out to be accurate, the 7.0 magnitude quake that hit impoverished Haiti on Tuesday would be one of the 10 deadliest earthquakes ever recorded.
Three days after it struck, gangs of robbers had begun preying on survivors living in makeshift camps on sidewalks and streets strewn with rubble and decomposing bodies, as quake aftershocks rippled through the hilly neighbourhoods.
President Rene Preval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive were living in and coordinating the government response from judicial police headquarters near the airport and their main concern was that desperation was turning to violence in the Western Hemisphere's poorest country.
“I do not have a home, I do not have a telephone, this is my palace now,” the shell-shocked president, whose government house collapsed in the quake, told Reuters in an interview.
Authorities reported some looting and growing anger among survivors despairing over the delay in life-saving assistance, as the United States and other nations rushed to deliver food, water and medical supplies through a jammed airport, a smashed seaport and roads littered with rubble.
“There have been some incidents where people were looting or fighting for food. They are desperate, they have been three days without food or any assistance,” said U.N. Undersecretary General for Peacekeeping, Alain Le Roy, whose 9,000-member mission in Haiti lost at least 36 of its own when its headquarters collapsed in the quake.
Le Roy told The PBS NewsHour that law and order remains under control “for the time being” but warned that hunger will fuel trouble if aid does not arrive quickly.
“We have to make sure that the situation doesn't unravel, but for that we need very much to ensure that the assistance is coming as quickly as possible so that the people who are dying for food and medicine get them as soon as possible,” he said.
President Barack Obama, who pledged an initial $100 million in quake relief, promised the United States would do what it takes to save lives and get Haiti back on its feet. “The scale of the devastation is extraordinary ... and the losses are heartbreaking,” Obama said at the White House.
The Pan American Health Organization said at least eight hospitals and health centers in Port-au-Prince had collapsed or sustained damage and were unable to function.
“We have no supplies. We need surgical gloves, antibiotics, antiseptic, disinfectant. We have nothing. Not even water. We have children out here with dry mouths and no water to give them,” said one doctor, Jean Dieudonne Occelien.
Police were scarcely seen on the streets, and although some Brazilian U.N. peacekeepers were patrolling, there were reports of sporadic scavenging, some looting and one report of gunshots in downtown Port-au-Prince on Friday.
At one collapsed supermarket, scores of people swarmed over the rubble to try to reach the food underneath. Just outside the Cite Soleil slum, desperate people crowded around a burst water pipe jostling to drink from the pipe or fill up buckets.
Trucks piled with corpses have been carrying bodies to hurriedly excavated mass graves outside the city, but thousands of bodies are still believed buried under rubble.
Haiti quake could not have been predicted - experts
LOS ANGELES, Jan 15, (Reuters)- The catastrophic earthquake that struck Haiti could not have been predicted, experts said on Friday, but seismologists have made progress in identifying areas likely to be hit by major quakes in the next few decades.
“There is currently no scientifically accepted method or theory of earthquake prediction,” said David Oglesby, an associate professor of earth sciences at the University of California, Riverside.
Geologists have long been aware that a major earthquake could rock the fault line that runs through the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. The hard part was figuring out when.
U.S. geologists presented a paper in 2008 concluding that Port-au-Prince, which had not been hit by a major seismic event since 1751, could face a 7.2 magnitude earthquake.
But they could not say with any degree of accuracy if that quake would come the next day or in 30 years.
“There has been very little progress in area of actually predicting an earthquake, if by prediction what you mean is a specific date, size of the event and location,” Stuart Sipkin, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey, told Reuters in an interview.
Former Haiti president
Aristide 'ready' to return
JOHANNESBURG, Jan 15, (AFP) -Former Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide, exiled in South Africa since 2004, said Friday he was “ready” to return to help rebuild the country in the wake of the devastating earthquake.
“As far as we are concerned, we are ready to leave today, tomorrow, at any time to join the people of Haiti, to share in their suffering, help rebuild the country,” he told reporters.
“Friends from around the world have confirmed their willingness to organise an airplane carrying medical supplies, emergency needs and ourselves,” he said, standing alongside his wife.
The 56-year-old former priest was Haiti's first democratically elected leader but was forced to flee a popular revolt in 2004 following two stints as president.
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