The Haitian prime minister has declared a state of emergency after a 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck the country’s southwest, causing several deaths and reducing buildings to rubble in the latest crisis to hit the Caribbean nation.
The earthquake struck on Saturday morning 12km (7.4 miles) northeast of Saint-Louis du Sud, on Haiti’s southern Tiburon Peninsula, at a shallow depth of 10km (6.2 miles), the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reported.
Jerry Chandler, who heads Haiti’s civil protection agency, told reporters that the earthquake had killed at least 29 people, while several others were injured. Search efforts are ongoing, Chandler said.
Haiti’s new prime minister, Ariel Henry, said on Twitter that the “violent quake” had caused loss of life and “enormous damage” in various parts of the country.
He said he would mobilise all available government resources to help victims and appealed to Haitians to unify as they “confront this dramatic situation in which we’re living right now”.
“We will make the necessary arrangements to assist those affected by the earthquake,” Henry also tweeted. “The government will declare a state of emergency. We will act quickly.”
The USGS said “high casualties are probable and the disaster is likely widespread”.
The European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) also reported a quake in the region, saying it was of 7.6 magnitude, while Cuba’s seismological centre said it registered a magnitude of 7.4.
The USGS issued a tsunami warning, saying waves of up to 3 metres (nearly 10 feet) were possible along the coastline of Haiti, but it soon lifted the warning.
Shocks were felt throughout Haiti and in neighbouring Caribbean countries.
“Lots of homes are destroyed, people are dead and some are at the hospital,” Christella Saint Hilaire, who lives near the epicentre, told the AFP news agency. “Everyone is in the street now and the shocks keep coming,” she added.
Residents shared images on social media of frantic efforts to pull people from the ruins of caved-in buildings, while screaming bystanders sought safety in the streets outside their homes.
“Houses and their surrounding walls have collapsed. The roof of the cathedral has fallen down,” resident Job Joseph told AFP from the hard-hit city of Jeremie on Haiti’s far western end.
Crises undermine disaster response
The impoverished country, where many live in tenuous circumstances, is vulnerable to earthquakes and hurricanes.
It was struck by a magnitude 5.9 earthquake in 2018 that killed more than a dozen people, and a magnitude 7.1 quake that damaged much of the capital in 2010 and killed an estimated 200,000 people.
The earthquake on Saturday struck more than a month after President Jovenel Moise was assassinated, sending a country already battling poverty, spiralling gang violence and COVID-19 into political chaos.
Jeremy Dupin, a journalist and filmmaker based in Port-au-Prince, told Al Jazeera that Haiti’s existing problems will severely undermine the response to the disaster.
“The epicentre is four hours’ drive away [from Port-au-Prince] and it is going to take a lot of time for support to arrive,” Dupin said. “Communications in some places are paralysed, and there are very limited electricity services in [the affected areas] right now,” he added.He said footage on social media appears to show people trapped under rubble with no rescue teams on the ground. “In [affected] communities people are just trying to help each other, and it is a very upsetting situation right now,” he said.
United States President Joe Biden approved “immediate” aid for Haiti on Saturday, a senior White House official said, according to a pool report. Biden named the head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Samantha Power, to coordinate the effort, the official said.
‘Years to fix things’
The quake on Saturday was felt as far as Cuba and Jamaica, although there were no reports of material damage, deaths or injuries anywhere.
Haiti is still recovering from the magnitude 7 earthquake closer to the capital 11 years ago.
More than a million and a half Haitians were made homeless, leaving island authorities and the international humanitarian community with a colossal challenge in a country lacking either a land registry or building codes.
