Four dead, homes demolished as earthquake strikes southwestern Haiti

Four dead, homes demolished as earthquake strikes southwestern Haiti

Jacqueline Charles

A magnitude 5.5 earthquake struck Haiti’s southwest region early Tuesday morning, destroying homes and creating panic in the country’s Grand’Anse region, where heavy rains over the weekend washed away parts of a main bridge and left a trail of disaster.

Jerry Chandler, the head of the country’s Office of Civil Protection, said at least four fatalities had been confirmed, along with 32 people injured. Disaster responders were still assessing damages, he added.

“Where the houses collapsed, there is no way to get equipment in there so they are doing it all manually,” he said. “People are trying to go in the rubble to see if they can find the bodies. But one body was removed and another is still inside. There is also a child that they have not yet found. That’s why they are saying there are three people who died.”

JCOMHaiti published some of the first images of the disaster, which showed buildings turned into rubble, some of the reported dozen injured and being treated for lacerations and people searching for loved ones in a collapsed whole of pink-colored concrete. One image showed a child face down buried under debris.

Haiti’s Office of Civil Protection said that some 60 houses were damaged inside the city and another 10 were damaged in an area called David, based on preliminary reports.

Claude Prépetit, Haiti’s chief seismologist, told the Miami Herald the quake occurred around 5:11 a.m. and its epicenter was in the ocean between the cities of Abricots and Jérémie, located on the western edge of the country’s southern peninsula.

“It was magnitude 5.5, which is a moderate earthquake,” he said. “But it was still strong enough to create panic in all of the Grand’Anse all the way to Les Cayes. They told me that they felt the shaking.”

Prépetit said he’s been told that “a lot of damage was done and there are people who died.”

This is the second earthquake to strike the area in two days. On Sunday morning, there was a magnitude 4.2 earthquake, said Prépetit, who was watching to see if there were aftershocks as is usually the case.