The death toll after the earthquake in Haiti continues to rise sharply. 1419 deaths have now been counted, said the head of the civil protection agency of the Caribbean state, Jerry Chandler, in a briefing televised on Monday. According to him, around 6,900 people were injured in the magnitude 7.2 quake on Saturday in the south of the country. The day before, the authorities had given the number of deaths as 1297. Interim Prime Minister Ariel Henry ordered three days of national mourning.
It is feared that the numbers will continue to rise because, according to the civil protection authorities, at least 13,700 houses were destroyed and just as many were damaged. More than 30,000 families are affected. People were buried under collapsed houses, hotels, schools, churches. Rescue work and relief measures, also from abroad, have started.
Now storms make the desperate search for survivors even more difficult. The tropical storm Grace caused heavy rainfall in the affected region. In an emergency shelter in Les Cayes on the Tiburon Peninsula in the southwest of the Caribbean state, the water was ankle-high, as can be seen in photos from Monday evening (local time). Completely soaked people went to the camp, some of their belongings in sacks on their heads, as other pictures showed. The US hurricane center warned in its latest report from late Monday evening (local time) of possible floods and landslides, including in the neighboring Dominican Republic.
Hospitals are overloaded
The quake occurred on Saturday morning about twelve kilometers from the municipality of Saint-Louis-du-Sud at a depth of about ten kilometers. With many aftershocks, some of them strong, numerous people spent the night on Sunday outdoors.
Hospitals were overburdened. In the courtyard of a hospital in Jérémie, one of the most affected cities, injured people were waiting in tents for their treatment, as was shown in a video on social networks. Roads were blocked after landslides.
Parts of the poor Caribbean country were devastated by a severe earthquake in 2010. At the center of the quake was Haiti’s densely populated capital, Port-au-Prince. 222,000 people were killed and more than 300,000 injured. More than a million people lost their homes. Politically, too, the situation is extremely tense – President Jovenel Moïse was only murdered in his residence at the beginning of July.