The preliminary number of earthquake deaths in Haiti rose again by more than 500 to 1941. More than 9,900 people were injured, the Haitian civil protection authority announced on Twitter on Tuesday. A day earlier there had been 1,419 confirmed deaths.
The 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 earthquake could only poorly protect themselves with tents and tarpaulins.
However, there was also a glimmer of hope: On Tuesday morning (local time), 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) flew 52 people for medical treatment according to its own information. The hospitals in the area were overloaded, poorly equipped, understaffed and self-damaged.
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The 7.2 magnitude quake occurred on Saturday morning (local time) 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. The essentials were missing. “The humanitarian situation is very worrying,” said the office of Interim Prime Minister Ariel Henry.
A 7.0 magnitude earthquake in January 2010 killed more than 220,000 people and left more than a million homeless in Haiti, America’s poorest country. Reconstruction suffered badly from corruption and waste.
People flee from gang wars
Haiti’s already severely underfunded health system has been overstretched by the recent worsening pandemic. In addition, there is a deep political crisis that intensified after the murder of President Jovenel Moïse by a commando in his residence on the night of July 7th. Fights between gangs for territory paralyze parts of the capital Port-au-Prince again and again and, according to UN figures, drove around 15,000 people to flee in June alone.
Gangs also control and block the main road to the south of the country. The government and UN representatives have negotiated that two aid convoys are allowed to drive on the road, said the UN Agency for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid (OCHA).
The Haitian human rights organization RNDDH criticized the government’s disaster relief as “total chaos”. “You are completely left to your own devices,” it said with regard to the earthquake victims. In the storm, many of the few tents and tarpaulins were torn, so that “they really don’t have a roof over their heads,” said Sibille Buehlmann from the Handicap International organization in Port-au-Prince of the German Press Agency. Even in the still standing houses in the earthquake region nobody sleeps anymore – because they could have become unstable and because of constant aftershocks. (dpa)
