Nearly 1,300 confirmed dead in Haiti earthquake as rescue crews fear aftershocks, storms
Almost 1,300 people have lost their lives in the major earthquake that on Saturday struck the southwestern peninsula of Haiti, where aftershocks and looming tropical weather threatened to hinder search and rescue teams and humanitarian efforts.
Officials on Sunday evening said 1,297 people were confirmed dead, 5,700 injured and 30,250 families were homeless following the strong quake that caused widespread destruction in the nation’s southwestern peninsula on Saturday. A day after the tremor, people in Haiti’s government and across an array of humanitarian organizations said some of the hardest hit communities are in desperate need of potable water and temporary shelters to house families who lost everything.
The immediate disaster response in Haiti is set against a challenging backdrop as heavy rains from a tropical depression are expected to roll over the region Monday, and political instability one month after the country’s president was assassinated. Amid the uncertainty, aid workers assessed damage and took stock of what will be a significant recovery effort for a country still struggling to recuperate after the devastating 2010 earthquake and Hurricane Matthew in 2016, which wiped out agriculture crops.
Sunday night, Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry told the Miami Herald that emergency responders are confirming more deaths amid ongoing search and rescue efforts. He visited Les Cayes, the peninsula’s largest city, which was pummeled by the quake, leaving many dead or homeless.
“Today in Les Cayes, there are several places I visited and there are still corpses underneath the rubble,” he said, adding that the current death toll will rise. “In my mind the [current] tally isn’t that far off from the final number, but I can’t say for sure.”
The main supermarket and smaller grocery stores in Les Cayes collapsed, leaving about half-a-million people with dwindling food supplies and drinking water. Many hospitals and clinics were heavily damaged, leaving the area with limited numbers of medical facilities and doctors. Aid workers in Haiti said that doctors had to treat injured people on the floor or outside.
“It’s an area that’s been totally destroyed,” Haitian Sen. Joseph Lambert told the Herald on Sunday. “The situation is very chaotic. It is certain that in the days to come there will be huge sanitary problems, food shortage problems and famine.”
Some in the quake ravaged area have complained about the lack of government and police presence.
Henry said the city of Les Cayes remains peaceful and the government is not going to deploy its small police force when there isn’t really a need. Up to now, he said, there is none.
“There is no one in Les Cayes who is attempting to loot or to attack anyone. If they want to see the deployment of a police force [under these circumstances], they won’t see it,” Henry said, addressing criticism. “We have a police force that’s not really big. They are tired because they have been busy. We will utilize them when we need them, according to how the situation presents itself. There are no police officers deployed because in the immediacy, it’s not necessary.”
Flow of humanitarian aid
Concerned about potential chaos in the relief effort, Henry issued an edict saying all donations from foreign countries and private organizations must be delivered to the island’s government so it can coordinate the distribution of make-shift shelters, food and medicine to the areas most affected by the devastating quake.
The order puts Haiti’s Office of Civil Protection in charge of all donations. He said the goal is to limit the mismanagement of donations that took place after Hurricane Matthew struck five years ago, when the distribution of aid to storm-ravaged communities was uneven. Some areas received a lot of donations, while others were ignored, leading to outbreaks of violence.
Henry said there is one big difference between Saturday’s earthquake and the one that destroyed parts of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, just 11 years ago.
“It’s how the authorities are approaching it,” he said in an interview shortly after arriving from his second visit in two days to the southern region. “For example, of the aid that is coming, we are making sure that it passes through one door of entry.”
Henry said it’s not that the government wants to stifle aid delivery, but it wants to avoid the waste, losses and uneven distributions that haunted both the January 2010 earthquake response and other disaster responses in Haiti. The government, he said, is seeking to discourage nongovernmental organizations and charities from doing what they want with their aid, and distributing it how they see fit.
“We are discouraging this,” he said. “We want there to be coordination.”
“And we don’t want them bringing things that we do not need,” he said.
He acknowledged that even in the government there are some who have a tendency to distribute aid how they see fit.
“What we want is for everyone to find [assistance]. We want to do a coordinated effort,” Henry said, noting that there are emergency operations centers stationed throughout to get the aid to those in need.
Henry said down the road, the government will also put in place a public-private sector group to address the aid distribution and response.
Organizations already in Haiti and others ready to respond are also trying not to repeat past failures. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs led a Sunday evening call with multiple organizations to coordinate aid efforts.
“You had hundreds of organizations that flew into Haiti and each of them had their own plan and did their own thing,” said Akim Kikonda, Catholic Legal Services’ top administrator in Haiti, of the response to the 2010 quake. Kikonda participated in Sunday night’s call.
“This time around, both on the side of the humanitarian community, as well as on the side of the government, there is a strong emphasis on coordination,” he said.
Foreign assistance from the U.S. government, United Nations and others was already starting to arrive in Haiti on Sunday. The U.S. Agency for International Development deployed an urban search and rescue team to join Haiti’s disaster response effort. The 65-person deployment brought 52,000 pounds of specialized tools, equipment and medical supplies to assist in search operations, officials said.
U.S. Coast Guards helicopters flew in from Clearwater, Florida, and were flying between the quake-struck region and the capital. About a dozen injured patients were brought in from Jeremie, a city on the north coast of the peninsula, before one of the choppers flew to Miragoane and then Les Cayes for more rescues.
Sarah Charles, assistant to the administrator of USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, said the agency’s team is working with the Haitian government and did an aerial assessment Sunday, spotting widespread destruction. The region is “difficult to access” because of security conditions, damaged roads and washed-out bridges.
Charles said that in addition to getting aid workers and supplies into the area, the potential for a torrential rainfall of four to eight inches in Haiti from a projected tropical storm “adds another complication to what is already a complicated logistics picture.”
“But our first priority is to get assistance to those that are in need in the safest way possible,” Charles told the McClatchy bureau in Washington, D.C.
Non-governmental organizations, including Humanity & Inclusion with 50 workers in Haiti, are also extending assistance.
“My colleagues are seeing serious rehabilitation, mental health and psycho-social needs,” said the NGO’s spokeswoman Mica Bevington.
Compounding problems
The quake brought down buildings, homes, hospitals and historic cathedrals in the impoverished nation of 11 million people, who are still struggling to recover from a devastating quake that left more than 300,000 dead over a decade ago.
The situation is compounded by government instability and dysfunction, worsened by the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July, and the COVID-19 pandemic and a lack of resources to deal with it. The country received its first batch of U.S.-donated coronavirus vaccines only last month via a United Nations program for low-income countries.
“This could not have come at a worse time,” said Marleine Bastien, a leader in South Florida’s Haitian community and executive director of the Family Action Network Movement.
Saturday’s quake, registered as a magnitude 7.2, forced government officials, humanitarian workers and weary Haitian citizens to dig through rubble for survivors, find water and food for the hungry and gauge the scope of yet another large-scale disaster.
Meanwhile, the remnants of Tropical Storm Grace are headed toward the country. There’s great concern — not because of wind, but because of potentially significant rainfall that could create mud and further destabilize buildings. In turn, that might slow rescue crews.
The prime minister’s office said emergency responders were assessing the earthquake’s damages. But even as damage assessments were ramping up, the country was still seeing a string of smaller aftershocks. They are a common occurrence following big earthquakes but unnerving for residents and potentially dangerous in areas with heavily damaged structures.
Making emergency response even more complicated is that the four regions struck by the quake have been cut off by violent armed gang warfare at the southern entrance of Haiti’s capital. Since June 1, the gang clashes have forced the displacement of over 16,000 Haitians from their homes in the poor neighborhood of Martissant.
The earthquake appears to have forced a temporary moment of peace to facilitate humanitarians efforts. Jean Rebel Dorcenat, who heads the disarmament effort, said on Sunday he asked one of the gang leaders personally to allow for a humanitarian corridor. Contact was also made with representatives of two other gang leaders that have been fighting.
“Since yesterday there hasn’t been any shooting in Martissant. Vehicles have been passing,” Dorcenat said, adding that he hails from the region and is himself a victim of the violence.
While Haitian officials and aid workers remained wary of their change of position, if it holds, the highway would allow aid to flow to devastated areas, alleviating concerns that trucks delivering the supplies would be held up and looted.
The quake damage was centered along the Tiburon, the country’s southwestern peninsula, about 80 miles west of the nation’s capital in Port-au-Prince. Although less densely populated than the capital, images posted on social media suggest there will be many casualties. The Catholic cathedral in Les Anglais was reduced to rubble, and homes and businesses were shown collapsed.
Jeremie, on the north coast of the peninsula, has also been cut off from Les Cayes, a port city on the southern coast, because the quake loosened boulders that blocked the main road between them. A rural town on the outskirts of Les Cayes, Camp-Perrin, was also hard hit.
Sen. Lambert said Les Cayes has suffered widespread damage and death, with homeless people wandering the streets in panic out of fear of reentering buildings during the aftershocks. Aftershocks were felt throughout the day and through the night. Many people now homeless or frightened by the possibility of their fractured homes collapsing on them stayed in the streets to sleep.
According to the United States Geological Survey, the quake’s epicenter was about 75 miles west of Port-au-Prince. USGS placed the quake’s magnitude at 7.2, and so did the Puerto Rico Seismic Network. If verified, the measurement would make Saturday’s seismic event stronger than the 7.0 quake that left much of Port-au-Prince in ruins in 2010.
Miami Herald staff writer Syra Ortiz-Blanes contributed to this report.
This story was originally published August 15, 2021 at 9:48 AM.
