The Death Toll From Haiti’s Earthquake Rises By 500 To 1,941

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Men carry the body of a boy, who was found in a collapsed building in Les Cayes, Haiti, on Tuesday.





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World
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World
Here’s How You Can Support Earthquake Relief Efforts In Haiti

Patience was running out in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation. Haitians already were struggling with the coronavirus, gang violence, worsening poverty and the July 7 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse when the quake hit.

Bodies continued to be pulled from the rubble, and the smell of death hung heavily over a pancaked, three-story apartment building. A simple bed sheet covered the body of a 3-year-old girl that firefighters had found an hour earlier.

Neighbor Joseph Boyer, 53, said he knew the girl’s family.

«The mother and father are in the hospital, but all three kids died, he said. The bodies of the other two siblings were found earlier.

Illustrating the lack of government presence, volunteer firefighters from the nearby city of Cap-Hatien had left the body out in the rain because police have to be present before a body can be taken away.





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People displaced by the earthquake take shelter inside a church on Tuesday morning after Tropical Storm Grace swept over Les Cayes, Haiti





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Children with nowhere to shelter except under a piece of plastic in Les Cayes, Haiti, on Tuesday.





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Residents watch an excavator remove rubble from a collapsed building in Les Cayes, Haiti.





Matias Delacroix/AP



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Environment
Why Earthquakes In Haiti Are So Catastrophic

Officials said the magnitude 7.2 earthquake destroyed more than 7,000 homes and damaged nearly 5,000, leaving about 30,000 families homeless. Hospitals, schools, offices and churches also were demolished or badly damaged.

In the village of Bonne Fin, a one-hour drive from from Les Cayes on dirt roads, the mountaintop Hospital Lumiere illustrated the anguish and complexity of Haiti’s medical crisis and dire need for outside help.

No one died or was injured at the hospital when the quake hit, but the operating rooms partially collapsed.

Through cracks in a wall, Dr. Frantz Codio could see three glistening anesthesia machines he needed to perform orthopedic operations on broken bones. But he could not get to them because the building’s cement floor was leaning at a crazy angle — in some places just 3 or 4 feet above where it used to be.

Despite warnings not to go inside the structure, Codio did so on Sunday and pulled one of the machines out.

«People said, ‘Don’t go in there, it’s too dangerous,’ but I had God with me, Codio said.

Etzer Emile, a Haitian economist and professor at Quisqueya University, a private institution in Port-au-Prince, said the earthquake will almost certainly result in more long-term poverty for Haiti’s struggling southwestern region.

Political instability and gang criminality along the southern roads into the region have particularly hobbled economic activity in recent years.

«The earthquake has just given a fatal blow to a regional economy already on its knees for about 2 1/2 years, Emile said.