More and more deaths are confirmed after the Haiti quake. Many survivors sleep outdoors and have now also had to experience a tropical storm. The rescue of 16 people gives hope.
Les Cayes – The confirmed death toll from Saturday’s earthquake in Haiti rose again by more than 500 to 1941.
The civil protection authority of the Caribbean state announced this on Tuesday and also corrected the number of injuries to more than 9,900 high. The day before, she had spoken of 1,419 dead. Search and rescue work continued on Tuesday after tropical storm “Grace” swept over the affected area on the Tiburon peninsula in southern Haiti during the night, causing flooding in some places. Tens of thousands of people who had lost their homes in the quake could only poorly protect themselves with tents and tarpaulins.
Glimmer of hope
However, there was also a glimmer of hope: on Tuesday morning, three days after the quake, 16 people were rescued alive from the rubble of a former UN building in the village of Brefèt, according to civil defense. Help also gradually arrived in the earthquake region. The US Agency for Development Cooperation (USAID) said it flew 52 people out for medical treatment. The hospitals in the area were overloaded and partially damaged. Many patients lay in the inner courtyards of the clinics. “The humanitarian situation is very worrying,” said the office of Interim Prime Minister Ariel Henry.
The 7.2 magnitude quake occurred on Saturday morning near the municipality of Saint-Louis-du-Sud, east of Les Cayes, at a depth of around ten kilometers. According to the civil protection authorities, a good 37,000 houses were destroyed and almost 47,000 damaged. According to Unicef, 1.2 million people were affected. The distress was great in the area that had been devastated by Hurricane Matthew five years earlier. According to Caritas International, food, drinking water, tents and medical first aid were needed.
Over a million people homeless
In Haiti, America’s poorest country, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in January 2010 killed more than 220,000 people and left more than a million homeless. Reconstruction suffered badly from corruption and waste.
Missing or damaged infrastructure threatened to hinder the relief and rescue operations after the new earthquake. The highway that connects the capital Port-au-Prince with Haiti’s south is often impassable because of fights between gangs for territory. According to UN figures, this violence drove around 15,000 people to flee in June alone.
“Total Chaos”
The Haitian human rights organization RNDDH criticized the government’s handling of the recent disaster as “total chaos”. “You are completely left to your own devices,” it said with regard to the earthquake victims. Desperate injured people waited in front of understaffed and poorly equipped hospitals.
Haiti’s already severely underfunded health system is overstretched by the recent worsening pandemic. In addition, there is a deep political crisis that intensified after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse by a commando in his residence on July 7th. dpa
