http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/7717030.stmIs how much more this country could take
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NYTimes.com
PÉTIONVILLE, Haiti — Rescuers digging through a collapsed school in Haiti pulled more bodies from sandwiched slabs of concrete, raising the death toll to 75 on Saturday as crews continued searching for survivors.
A fireman carried a child who was rescued from the rubble of a school that collapsed in Pétionville, Haiti, on Friday.
Haiti’s president, Rene Preval, said that poor construction, including a lack of steel reinforcement, was to blame for Friday’s collapse of the concrete Collège La Promesse Evangelique in Pétionville. Roughly 500 children and teenagers typically crowded into the three-story building.
Structures throughout Haiti face similar risks because of poor construction and a lack of government oversight, Mr. Preval said.
“It’s not just schools, it’s where people live, it’s churches,” he said at the site of the collapse as crews picked through the wreckage in search of more victims.
Doctors Without Borders was treating more than 80 people, many with serious injuries, said Francois Servranckx, a spokesman for the aid group.
Mayor Claire Lydie Parent of Pétionville said that at least 17 students were found crushed in a single classroom on Saturday but the report was denied by a doctor and firefighter at the scene.
“There are a lot of rumors, you know,” said Cap Haitien Fire Chief Ardouin Zephirin, who was brought in from Haiti’s second-largest city to help with the disaster on the outskirts of the capital, Port-au-Prince.
Mr. Preval said a previous mayor of Pétionville had tried to halt the expansion of La Promesse because of safety concerns but the effort faltered when a new mayor came into power in the hillside suburb.
“We have got to have a consistent policy that when one administration leaves office the next continues its work,” the president said. “The next time the mayor speaks and the authorities speak, people will listen.”
International aid was trickling in.
Nearly 40 search-and-rescue officials from Fairfax, Va., were expected to arrive with dogs by Saturday afternoon, said Alexandre Deprez, acting director of the local United States Agency for International Development.
“I see a dramatic turnabout in the situation once they’re here,” he said. “We’ve done everything we possibly can practically from the first hour.”
The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispañiola with Haiti, was sending two helicopters to help, Dominican Health Minister Bautista Rojas said.
France also sent a team of 15 firefighters and doctors with two rescue dogs. A French civil protection official, Commandant Patrick Vailli, said Saturday that the workers spotted five people believed to be alive in the school’s two basements and recovered two bodies.
Haiti’s police commissioner, Francene Moreau, said the minister who runs the church-operated school could face criminal charges. Efforts to reach the preacher were not successful.
Thousands looked on from beside the school and across the valley, cheering each time a live student was extricated from the debris. One student who emerged and was lifted on a stretcher cried and made the sign of the cross over and over.
Thousands of Haitian laborers live in collapse-prone hillside slums around the capital to be near the mansions of the foreign diplomats, United Nations staff and wealthy elite for whom they work.
Ms. Parent said they toiled endlessly throughout the year to afford the school’s $1,500 tuition in hopes of empowering their children to someday escape poverty.
Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, has been struggling to recover from widespread riots over rising food prices, a string of hurricanes and tropical storms that left nearly 800 people dead.
The United Nations peacekeepers were sent to Haiti after the ouster of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. They have tried to improve security by fighting gangs and training the local police.
