Posts Tagged earthquake

Collapsed building near Petionville

Daniel O’Neil

I am just back from a quick trip into Port-au-Prince to provide initial assistance following the earthquake. Although I lived for six years in Haiti and helped with the response following numerous floods, I’ve never seen anything like this. I did not go into the heart of the damaged area, but was amazed at the damage that was everywhere. As I drove into town, I began to see the first impacts–a section of wall that collapsed here or there. A bit later, I saw whole cinder block walls that were down. A bit later, whole neighborhoods with their walls down. Then I began seeing concrete roofs that had crashed down. As I got into the center part of town, there were buildings down everywhere and corpses left out on the sidewalk for pickup.

What really makes life tough is the lack of services. Everyone is desperately trying to find out who was hurt, but the cellphone service is just starting to work again and the landlines are all down. Port-au-Prince has run out of gas, so the gas stations have become large parking lots that spill out into the roads. There has been no electricity since the quake. Potable water, which has always been expensive, is no very hard to find.

I’m sure that the national authorities are doing their best, but they don’t have much with which to work. The Civil Protection Department does not have any fuel for their vehicles and no one seems to have satellite phones.

It is hard breaking to see the damage and even more to imagine how hard it will be to rebuild. Poor Haiti was hardly finished digging out from the  four hurricanes that hit just two years ago. How will they ever recover from this?

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Collapsed supermarket