Haiti: a powerful earthquake kills several and extensive material damage

Published on : 08/14/2021 – 17:02

A magnitude 7.2 earthquake occurred on Saturday August 14 in Haiti around 8:30 a.m. local time (12:30 p.m. GMT) 12 km from the city of Saint-Louis-du-Sud, some 160 km away. of the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, according to data from the American Institute of Geophysics (USGS).

A tsunami warning was issued in the wake of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency before being quickly lifted.

“There are deaths, I confirm, but I do not yet have the precise record,” the director of Haitian civil protection, Jerry Chandler, told AFP.

Prime Minister Ariel Henry was on his way to the national emergency operations center in Port-au-Prince and is expected to speak at a press conference, added Jerry Chandler.

Collapsed houses

The long shock was felt throughout the country and material damage has already been recorded in several cities, according to images of witnesses in the southwestern peninsula of the island, published on social networks.

“I was inside my house when it started to shake, I was near a window and I saw all the things falling”, told AFP Christella Saint Hilaire, 21, who lives near the epicenter of the earthquake. “A piece of wall fell on my back but I am not too injured”, continued the young woman. “Several houses have completely collapsed.”

On videos shared online, residents have filmed the ruins of various concrete buildings including a church in which a ceremony was apparently underway on Saturday morning in the town of Les Anglais, 200 km southwest of Port-au -Prince.

The poorest country in the Americas still remembers the earthquake of January 12, 2010, which devastated the capital and several provincial towns. More than 200,000 people were killed and over 300,000 others were injured in the disaster.

More than a million and a half Haitians were then left homeless, placing the authorities and the international humanitarian community before the colossal challenge of reconstruction in a country without land registry or building rules.

Without succeeding in meeting this reconstruction challenge, Haiti, which is also regularly hit by hurricanes, has in ten years plunged into an acute socio-political crisis.

With AFP