Rio de Janeiro, Aug. 16, (dpa/GNA) – Rescuers in Haiti are working fast to find the injured and dead after a devastating earthquake left nearly 1,300 people dead, with heavy rains forecast to complicate the emergency work later on Monday.
Tropical depression Grace threatens to worsen the situation in areas hit by the quake, Haiti’s civil protection agency said. The US hurricane centre warned of flooding and landslides.
“As of this Monday, we will act with greater speed,” Haiti’s interim Prime Minister Ariel Henry said on Twitter.
“Aid management will be stepped up. We are going to increase our energies tenfold to reach the maximum number of victims possible,” Henry wrote.
Following the magnitude-7.2 quake on Saturday morning, the number of victims reported so far rose overnight from 724 to almost 1,297.
The quake occurred around 12 kilometres from the municipality of Saint-Louis-du-Sud at a depth of around 10 kilometres.
Numerous buildings were destroyed and photos from the area showed people picking through the rubble of their homes.
More than 5,700 people were injured, the newspaper Le Nouvelliste reported, citing the civil defence.
At least 13,700 houses were destroyed and just as many damaged. More than 30,000 families were affected, the report added.
“Thousands of people are still on the streets looking for their loved ones or trying to salvage some of their belongings from under the rubble,” said Marcelo Viscarra, country director of children’s charity World Vision in Haiti.
According to Caritas International, the main items needed are food, drinking water, tents and primary health care.
Hospitals were overloaded. In the courtyard of a hospital in Jeremie, one of the worst-hit towns, injured people waited in tents for treatment, as seen in a video posted on social media.
Haiti, considered the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, is still living with the impact of the January 12, 2010, magnitude-7.0 earthquake that killed some 220,000 people and left 1 million people homeless. Damage from that earthquake, which struck near densely populated Port-au-Prince, was estimated at 8 billion dollars.
Haiti has also been in political turmoil since the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in July. He was shot dead in a middle-of-the-night attack at his residence by a heavily armed commando force.
GNA