As of this posting (9 a.m. Wednesday) there are still no official casualties reported in the devastating 7.0 earthquake that rocked Haiti Tuesday afternoon.
But initial reports are not promising. The United Nations says that its five-story headquarters had collapsed and “a large number of personnel remain unaccounted for.''
From today's Miami Herald:
Haitian President René Préval and first lady Elisabeth Préval, who were not in the national palace at the time of the quake, issued an urgent appeal for help on behalf of the country Wednesday morning.
The appeal came as the two were stepping over dead bodies and hearing the cries of people trapped under the rubble in front of the Haitian Parliament. Among those trapped inside the building but still alive was the president of the Haitian Senate, Kely Bastien.
“This is a catastrophe,'' the first lady said. “I'm stepping over dead bodies. A lot of people are buried under buildings. The general hospital has collapsed. We need support. We need help. We need engineers.''
According to CNN, Preval also says the capital city of Port-au-Prince is "destroyed."
The International Red Cross says that as many as 3 million people have been affected by the quake.
We are learning that, like other high risk areas such as California, geologists predicted that the island of Hispaniola was vulnerable.
This CNN report says:
Five scientists presented a paper during the 18th Caribbean Geological Conference in March 2008 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, stating that a fault zone on the south side of the island posed "a major seismic hazard."
Tuesday's potentially disastrous 7.0 earthquake occurred in Haiti along the same fault line, known as the Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden fault zone.
"We were concerned about it," said one of the paper's authors, Paul Mann, a senior research scientist at the University of Texas' Institute for Geophysics.
"The problem with these kinds of strikes is that they can remain quiescent — dormant — for hundreds of years," he said Tuesday evening. "So it's hard to predict when they'll occur."
But there might be a glimmer of hope revealed later in the article, in a quote from Paul Mann at the University of Texas, who says, ""Port-au-Prince doesn't have high-rises. It's mostly a low-rise kind of place. And that may be a fortunate thing for them."
As a native Californian, I lived through a number of minor quakes, and the big one in October of 1989. What California has done over the decades, to the cost of billions of dollars, is spend money to retrofit so many many buildings and structures, to prevent damage that can occur from a major quake.
The 7.9 earthquake that hit Western China in May of 2008 killed 70,000 people. In 1976, an earthquake in China killed an unbelievable 240,000. After that, the country required new structures withstand major jolts. But the collapse of schools, hospitals and factories raised major questions about how rigorous those codes were enforced.
Congressman and Democratic Senate hopeful Kendrick Meek represents, portions of Miami where many Haitians live. He is advising any citizens wondering about their family in Haiti, to call 1-888-407-4747, a phone line set up by the State Department in conjunction with American Citizen Services.
This article appears in Jan 13-19, 2010.