Thousands feared dead in Haiti quake; many trapped

[bigted]

Thousands feared dead in Haiti quake; many trapped

AP

Haiti quake could affect 3 million: official Play Video CBC.ca – Haiti quake could affect 3 million: official

* Strong earthquake hits Haiti Slideshow:Strong earthquake hits Haiti

* Haiti quake rescue escalates Play Video Video:Haiti quake rescue escalates Reuters

* Haitian Americans React to Devastating Earthquake Play Video Video:Haitian Americans React to Devastating Earthquake AP

A man gestures behind a person trapped in the rubble of a collapsed building in AP – A man gestures behind a person trapped in the rubble of a collapsed building in Port-au-Prince Wednesday, …

By JONATHAN M. KATZ, Associated Press Writer Jonathan M. Katz, Associated Press Writer – 13 mins ago

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Haitians piled bodies along the devastated streets of their capital Wednesday after a powerful earthquake crushed thousands of structures, from schools and shacks to the National Palace and the U.N. peacekeeping headquarters. Untold numbers were still trapped.

President Rene Preval said he believes thousands of people were dead from Tuesday afternoon's magnitude-7.0 quake.

"Parliament has collapsed. The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed," Preval told the Miami Herald. "There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them."

Even the main prison in the capital fell, "and there are reports of escaped inmates," U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said in Geneva.

The Roman Catholic archbishop of Port-au-Prince was among the dead, and the head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission was missing.

The international Red Cross said a third of Haiti's 9 million people may need emergency aid and that it would take a day or two for a clear picture of the damage to emerge.

At first light Wednesday, a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter evacuated four critically injured U.S. Embassy staff to the hospital on the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the military has been detaining suspected terrorists for the last seven years.

President Barack Obama promised an all-out rescue and humanitarian effort, adding that the U.S. commitment to its hemispheric neighbor will be unwavering.

"We have to be there for them in their hour of need," Obama said.

Other nations — from Iceland to Venezuela — said they would start sending in aid workers and rescue teams. Cuba said its existing field hospitals in Haiti had already treated hundreds of victims. The United Nations said Port-au-Prince's main airport was "fully operational" and open to relief flights.

Aftershocks continued to rattle the capital of 2 million people as women covered in dust clawed out of debris, wailing. Stunned people wandered the streets holding hands. Thousands gathered in public squares to sing hymns.

People pulled bodies from collapsed homes, covering them with sheets by the side of the road. Passers-by lifted the sheets to see if loved ones were underneath. Outside a crumbled building, the bodies of five children and three adults lay in a pile.

The prominent died along with the poor: the body of Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot, 63, was found in the ruins of his office, said the Rev. Pierre Le Beller of the Saint Jacques Missionary Center in Landivisiau, France. He told The Associated Press by telephone that fellow missionaries in Haiti had told him they found Miot's body.

Preval told the Herald that Haiti's Senate president was among those trapped alive inside the Parliament building. Much of the National Palace pancaked on itself.

The international Red Cross and other aid groups announced plans for major relief operations in the Western Hemisphere's poorest country.

Many will have to help their own staff as well as stricken Haitians. Taiwan said its embassy was destroyed and the ambassador hospitalized. Spain said its embassy was badly damaged.

Tens of thousands of people lost their homes as buildings that were flimsy and dangerous even under normal conditions collapsed. Nobody offered an estimate of the dead, but the numbers were clearly enormous.

"The hospitals cannot handle all these victims," said Dr. Louis-Gerard Gilles. "Haiti needs to pray. We all need to pray together."

An American aid worker was trapped for about 10 hours under the rubble of her mission house before she was rescued by her husband, who told CBS' "Early Show" that he drove 100 miles (160 kilometers) to Port-au-Prince to find her. Frank Thorp said he dug for more than an hour to free his wife, Jillian, and a co-worker, from under about a foot of concrete.

An estimated 40,000-45,000 Americans live in Haiti, and the U.S. Embassy had no confirmed reports of deaths among its citizens. All but one American employed by the embassy have been accounted for, State Department officials said.

Even relatively wealthy neighborhoods were devastated.

An AP videographer saw a wrecked hospital where people screamed for help in Petionville, a hillside district that is home to many diplomats and wealthy Haitians as well as the poor.

At a destroyed four-story apartment building, a girl of about 16 stood atop a car, trying to see inside while several men pulled at a foot sticking from rubble. She said her family was inside.

"A school near here collapsed totally," Petionville resident Ken Michel said after surveying the damage. "We don't know if there were any children inside." He said many seemingly sturdy homes nearby were split apart.

The U.N.'s 9,000 peacekeepers in Haiti, many of whom are from Brazil, were distracted from aid efforts by their own tragedy: Many spent the night hunting for survivors in the ruins of their headquarters.

"It would appear that everyone who was in the building, including my friend Hedi Annabi, the United Nations' secretary-general's special envoy, and everyone with him and around him, are dead," French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on RTL radio.

But U.N. peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy would not confirm that Annabi was dead, saying he was among more than 100 people missing in its wrecked headquarters. He said only about 10 people had been pulled out, many of them badly injured. Fewer than five bodies had been removed, he said.

U.N. peacekeeping forces in Port-au-Prince are securing the airport, the port, main buildings and patrolling the streets, Le Roy said.

Brazil's army said at least 11 of its peacekeepers were killed, while Jordan's official news agency said three of its peacekeepers were killed. A state newspaper in China said eight Chinese peacekeepers were known dead and 10 were missing — though officials later said the information was not confirmed.

The quake struck at 4:53 p.m., centered 10 miles (15 kilometers) west of Port-au-Prince at a depth of only 5 miles (8 kilometers), the U.S. Geological Survey said. USGS geophysicist Kristin Marano called it the strongest earthquake since 1770 in what is now Haiti.

Video obtained by the AP showed a huge dust cloud rising over Port-au-Prince shortly after the quake as buildings collapsed.

Most Haitians are desperately poor, and after years of political instability the country has no real construction standards. In November 2008, following the collapse of a school in Petionville, the mayor of Port-au-Prince estimated about 60 percent of buildings were shoddily built and unsafe normally.

The quake was felt in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, and in eastern Cuba, but no major damage was reported in either place.

With electricity out in many places and phone service erratic, it was nearly impossible for Haitian or foreign officials to get full details of the devastation.

"Everybody is just totally, totally freaked out and shaken," said Henry Bahn, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official in Port-au-Prince. "The sky is just gray with dust."

Edwidge Danticat, an award-winning Haitian-American author was unable to contact relatives in Haiti. She sat with family and friends at her home in Miami, looking for news on the Internet and watching TV news reports.

"You want to go there, but you just have to wait," she said. "Life is already so fragile in Haiti, and to have this on such a massive scale, it's unimaginable how the country will be able to recover from this."

[Turntable]

terrible

[Ale]

Very, very sad. RIP to all the victims.

I'm speechless..

[VIsqo]

I live in Dominican Republic, which is next door to Haiti and we felt the Quake, but it wasnt even near as bad as it was there.. Things are awful right now in Haiti.. We are sending all the help we can give them.. Its a pretty sad situation,

[Turntable]

100k dead by now, terrible

[VIsqo]

Actually thats just an estimation based on the destruction.. We still dont know how many death people there are..

[rawad_m]

unbelievable :(

[bigted]

Props to real brothas like Sam Dalembert of the Philadelphia 76ers, check out this story:

Haiti in need of Dalembert’s greatest assist

Adrian Wojnarowski

By Adrian Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports Jan 14, 6:59 am EST

PHILADELPHIA – They were bouncing on one of those narrow dirt roads, pushing out of the cluttered downtown of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and out to the central plateau, the poorest part of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The Philadelphia 76ers’ Sam Dalembert traveled home to Haiti over the summer to scout a location for a children’s academy on the outskirts of the city.

Sam Dalembert grew up in Haiti before becoming a first-round draft pick of the 76ers in 2001.

(Scott Cunningham/NBAE/Getty)

This was the country where Dalembert walked barefoot as a boy, where his grandmother used to invite his starving, homeless friends for a scrap of food and a night’s sleep on sheets strewn on the floor. This is the most improbable birthing place of an NBA millionaire, the against-all-odds story in a sport where those sprout off trees.

A mayor had delivered Dalembert a plot of land for the construction, and the Samuel Dalembert Foundation and a non-profit partner, Mediashare, intended to soon commission an architect to make plans. He wanted it to be a place where the most determined, driven children could aspire to come to take academic and art classes and play sports. Here, there were no roads. No irrigation. People traveled miles to reach drinkable water. Dalembert didn’t return to be a savior, just a loyal Haitian son.

“I know I can’t save the world,” Dalembert said late Wednesday in a private moment. “I know I can’t save my country.

“But I thought I could save some kids there. …I thought I could give some hope, where there really isn’t any.”

Dalembert’s friend Emmanuel was of Haitian descent, but had never visited the island of his ancestors. Apparently, this reaction comes with everyone who visits Haiti. No one is ever prepared for what they witness. How could somewhere so close to the United States be so impoverished, so third-world? Over the summer, Emmanuel walked the neighborhood in Port-au-Prince where Dalembert lived as a child, and his eyes grew wide with the poverty, the hunger, the sickness.

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Who could survive this? Who could go to a fine American university, make it to the first round of the NBA draft, to an eventual $64 million contract?

Beyond the streets of Port-au-Prince, all the way out to the central plateau, Emmanuel kept asking: “Sam, how did you ever get out of here?”

Here Dalembert was, 28 years old, and that question washed over him with this odd mix of wonderment and confusion, of gratitude and guilt.

“And it made me think … why me?” Dalembert said. “Of all the people … why me? All these countries in the world where they play basketball, where they produce players and this skinny boy from Haiti…

“Why me?”

He was almost sheepish retelling the story, because it seems silly to ask now. Why him? Well, now Sam Dalembert knows. For this earthquake, this devastation, has sobered him in a way nothing else ever could. Why did he get out, and make it big? Because they would need him now, because they need everyone. He’s never been so sure of anything.

This had been the most tortured, cruelest day of Dalembert’s life. He wanted to charter a flight to Port-au-Prince, but it wasn’t possible. His family has mostly moved to the United States through the years, but there are still so many relatives, so many friends. He used his platform to tell the story of Haiti, and he did an endless run of interviews and pleaded for support. In something of a daze, Dalembert played in the Sixers’ 93-92 loss to the New York Knicks and delivered 12 points and 21 rebounds.

The game had been over an hour now, and Dalembert had slipped on an “NBA Cares” gold shirt to tape a public service announcement in a side room of the Wachovia Center. When tragedy hits, the NBA is good this way. It had Yao Ming(notes) tape a message when an earthquake hit China, and now the league wanted Dalembert to do it for Haiti. Within hours, the PSA will play everywhere. It will reach the corners of the globe, and in a lot of places, for a lot of people, Sam Dalembert will be the face, the voice, of his anguished, suffering people. Hundreds of thousands could be dead in Haiti, and millions more will need help for sheer survival.

“We’re tough people at heart,” he said. “We deal with things the best we can. These people, they don’t do anything to deserve this.”

Dalembert left Haiti for Montreal at 14, moved to New Jersey to play high school basketball and ended up earning a scholarship to Seton Hall. His parents and siblings live in Florida, where his grandmother is desperate to know if her old family and friends survived, if anything, or anyone, in their old neighborhood isn’t buried in the rubble.

As a young boy in Port-au-Prince, Dalembert grew too fast to stay in shoes. Those feet blew through them, and so he would walk barefoot through jagged streets. He thinks about his grandmother, his parents, about the value they placed on education, about possibilities, and how they gave him a reason to dream even when such despair surrounded him.

Throughout his childhood, there was something he always told his friends that made them laugh. Through the pain, he smiled for a moment on Wednesday night and remembered the way they roared at that goofy, gangly kid stumbling with those floppy feet when he’d tell them, “One of these days, I’m going to fit myself into a suitcase, go onto one of those planes, get out of the country and have a better life.”

As much as he wanted something more, it still resonates within him that he never, ever thought they had it so bad there. “You would get used it,” Dalembert said. “You can be in a worse place, but have good people around you. You just think this is the way people live until you come to America and go to the market and the chicken is clean over here.”

Dalembert didn’t have much in Port-au-Prince, but he always felt like he had a little more. As he rapidly grew, he passed his clothes to friends and watched as they proudly marched around with baggy shirts and pants. “We didn’t think there was anything wrong. …We thought, we have … life.

“We were grateful we weren’t sick. We were able to eat at least one meal a day. As long as we have each other, as long as we were there for each other, that was enough.”

Here’s the strange irony about Dalembert: Few players in the NBA have done more missionary work with the league. Every year, he travels to faraway places like Africa in the NBA’s Basketball Without Borders program. He’s a basketball missionary. The NBA calls, and he’s on his way. From Africa to New Orleans for Katrina relief, he gives of his time every offseason. When they ask, Dalembert goes. He has been that way for his eight seasons in Philadelphia. He had his agent, Marc Cornstein, on the phone with NBA officials Wednesday discussing ways to raise money and awareness for disaster relief.

Dalembert has never been a photo-op do-gooder. He has always been there for the long haul, when the cameras aren’t there to record his every good deed. To say that Dalembert has always honored the most humble of beginnings with remarkable generosity is true, but sometimes his professional behavior could be less noble. He has grumbled about wanting trades. He has complained about his minutes, his role – all typical NBA frustrations. Dalembert played the part of the prima donna for the Canadian Olympic team, and they parted ways before the team ever left for the Beijing Games in 2008.

He didn’t try to defend himself and says simply now, “This summer, I finally tried to realize that it doesn’t do me any good anymore to point fingers at anyone when something doesn’t go right.” It was something about that trip back to Haiti, that question that was raised with his buddy Emmanuel that stayed with him.

Why him? For too long, it dogged him. As he has promised his friends, he had slipped himself into that suitcase, flown away and made an incredible life. All that, so he could come back again and again.

Now, Dalembert desperately wants to get on a plane, and get over there, and that’ll happen eventually. For now, he’s going to be the face, the voice, of Haiti for millions of people, because his feet grew too fast to find shoes, his legs too long to wear his daddy’s old pants. Someday, he’s sure he’s going to build that children’s center, but now his mind, his heart, is on the short-term survival of his people: food, medicine and shelter.

It was 10:15 p.m. on Wednesday, in this quiet room in the Wachovia Center, and Dalembert still had so much frustration about why this quake had to happen to a place, to a people, that never, ever stop suffering. Now, they dig them out of rubble, tens of thousands dead and a loyal son of Haiti watched from far away like everyone else. Why were they buried, and why was he an NBA millionaire? The answer will probably always confound him on some level, but this was too long of a day and night for guilt, for that question that chased him over the summer when he tried to make sense of it all amid the poorest of the poor in our part of the world.

Why him?

Now, he knows.

Nothing’s ever been so clear.

“I know what I have to do now,” Samuel Dalembert(notes) said. “I know why I’m here.”

For more information on how to help with the relief effort in Haiti, visit Dalembert’s foundation at www.dalembertfoundation.org.

[VIsqo]

Wyclef, Dalembert and the others are doing a great job for those people in Haiti.

[KevTastic]

Keep donating all you can people. Whatever our financial worries we are rich beyond belief compared to the suffering that is occuring over there right now.

[bigted]

I read online at allhiphop.com that Rick Ross of all rappers is doing a blood drive for Haiti, it's about time somebody else in hip hop is getting involved and doing something positive to help out besides the ones that usually do

Edited January 19, 2010 by bigted

[Turntable]

Bun B organized and hosted a show for Haiti in Houston, Jay-Z, Bono & Swizz Beatz are making a song together, Wyclef is putting together a show with George Cloney

[VIsqo]

People all over the world have been doing great things for Haiti, but the situation aint pretty. I was there a few days ago as part of a Medical help staff and it was horrible. Citizens there started a strike because of the delay of the international help (thing I found to be really stupid because nobody is obligated to help nobody, people all over the world are doing it from their hearts), they attacked the food supply and the medical control bases and military help had to come and straight things down. After that we had like a couple of hours of peace before people started raging again against the medical base, this time they started throwing rocks at us to protest about the lines we made them do in order to organize the service. We had to run away from the place and people started robbing the medical supplies and our food, everything until the millitary came again.

The destruction is inimaginable in that country, but not from now, its been like that since a long time ago because their own people, summed in poverty and lack of education destroyed their country, the rivers are dry because they took down the trees around them, and while I was helping there it seemed like every family was composed of at least 4 children, the worse I saw was a 30 year old mom with 11 kids of her own, most of them pretty sick. Hatitians have been inmigrating to my country (DR) but nearly non of them get to rise up from the poverty they left back home.

It has been very difficult to sparse the food to the people, mosty because they attack the places where food is being given. Some people say that this is because the biggest jail there was destroyed by the Quake and more than 3000 inmates escaped and are running wild on the streets right now, so it aint the safest place in the world. Also people are desperate and they cant wait till their turn arrive so they start fighting and throwing things everywhere and destroy the helping bases created to give the food to them. What we did to be able to give the food we took there, was to establish a base, secretly and unannounced and then bring people there to give the food to them. More and more people started coming and in order to be able to stop them from fighting and having problems, we started throwing the bags with the food to them in separately groups.. The hospitals are destroyed in the capital, and most of the baldly injured patients have been traslated to my country, but now we have a problem of space in most of the bggest hospitals in DR, so we have to improvise attention bases in houses and stuff..

By the end of my second day there, when I was giving some stiches to a 3 year old kid, one guy got mad because his turn wasnt still there and he waited for around 2 and a half hours, so he took a knife of his pocket and stabbed one of the security staff guys in the abdomen. Then people got wild and started fighting one another while me and my friend were trying to get the injured security guy out of there.. It was mayhem.

After that I decided to leave because it is too dangerous there not only for the Haitians, but also to the ones who are trying really hard to help them go through this difficult time. I think this is gonna be my last visit to Haiti since Im moving to the States to start my Internal Medicine residency program there, but the Last Image of the place was one of misery, destruction, disorganization, desesperation and helplessness, just the same image I had of them on my first visit 4 years ago..

[Ale]

Thanks for sharing that with us, Viz. It's really horrible the images from Haiti we see everyday on the news, so being there must be much worse. All my respect and admiration for the people who are helping, especially the medical staff.

Edited January 21, 2010 by Ale

[bigted]

Thanks for sharing that with us, Viz. It's really horrible the images from Haiti we see everyday on the news, so being there must be much worse. All my respect and admiration for the people who are helping, especially the medical staff.

Word, much respect