PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The first cargo planes with food, water, medical supplies, shelter and sniffer dogs headed to the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation on Wednesday, a day after a magnitude-7 earthquake flattened much of the capital of 2 million people.
Rescuers searched collapsed buildings as officials feared the death toll from Haiti’s devastating earthquake could reach into the tens of thousands.
Tuesday’s quake brought down buildings great and small — from shacks in shantytowns to President Rene Preval’s gleaming white National Palace, where a dome tilted ominously above the manicured grounds.
Hospitals, schools and the main prison collapsed. The capital’s Roman Catholic archbishop was killed when his office and the main cathedral fell. The head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission was missing in the ruins of the organization’s headquarters.
At a triage center improvised in a hotel parking lot, people with cuts, broken bones and crushed ribs moaned under tentlike covers fashioned from bloody sheets.
“I can’t take it anymore. My back hurts too much,” said Alex Georges, 28, who was still waiting for treatment a day after the school he was in collapsed and killed 11 classmates. A body lay a few feet away.
Haiti’s leaders struggled to comprehend the extent of the catastrophe — the worst earthquake to hit the country in 200 years — even as aftershocks still reverberated.
“It’s incredible,” Preval told CNN. “A lot of houses destroyed, hospitals, schools, personal homes. A lot of people in the street dead. . . . I’m still looking to understand the magnitude of the event and how to manage.”
Preval said thousands of people were probably killed. Sen. Youri Latortue said 500,000 could be dead but conceded that nobody really knows.
“Let’s say that it’s too early to give a number,” Preval said.
Looting began almost as quickly as the quake struck at 4:53 p.m., as people were seen carrying food from collapsed buildings. Many lugged what they could salvage and stacked it around them as they slept in streets and parks.
People streamed into the Haitian countryside, where wooden and cinderblock shacks showed little sign of damage. Many balanced suitcases and other belongings on their heads. Ambulances and U.N. trucks raced in the opposite direction, toward Port-au-Prince.
About 3,000 police and international peacekeepers cleared debris, directed traffic and maintained security in the capital.
Law enforcement was stretched thin even before the quake and would be ill-equipped to deal with major unrest.
A U.S. 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’s “Early Show” that he drove 100 miles 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.
The international Red Cross said a third of the country’s 9 million people may need emergency aid, a burden that would test any nation and a crushing catastrophe for impoverished Haiti.
Haiti’s quake refugees likely will face an increased risk of illness and complications from untreated injuries, experts said. Some of the biggest include respiratory disease from inhaling dust from collapsed buildings and diarrhea from drinking contaminated water.
The U.S. Embassy had no confirmed reports of deaths among the estimated 40,000-45,000 Americans who live in Haiti, but many were struggling to find a way out of the country.
