Haitians seek help at overloaded hospitals after quake

Les Cayes, Haiti — Doctors in Haiti are battling in makeshift tents to save the lives of hundreds of injured people, including young children and the elderly, outside hospitals overwhelmed by an earthquake that killed 1,419 people.

While rescue teams toiled to dig out survivors of Saturday’s 7.2 magnitude quake, a storm dumped heavy rain on the southern coast of Haiti, bringing flooding near the worst-hit areas and worsening the humanitarian crisis, local residents said.

Deus Deronneth, a politician from the Jacmel region, posted a video on Twitter showing a torrent of water sweeping through a local town and confirmed the flooding.

The earthquake brought down tens of thousands of buildings in the impoverished country, which is still recovering from an earthquake 11 years ago and the assassination of its president, Jovenel Moise, on July 7.

Dozens of churches, hotels, homes and schools were damaged or ruined by the quake. Haitian authorities said that 1,419 fatalities had been confirmed, with about 6,900 people injured and 37,312 houses destroyed.

Data circulating among aid groups indicated more than 450 additional deaths had been logged in the hardest-hit department, and Haitian officials warned the toll was likely to rise.

The areas in and around the city of Les Cayes — 150km west of the Caribbean country's capital Port-au-Prince — suffered the most damage, putting enormous strain on local hospitals, some of which were badly damaged.

Collapsed buildings lined the main street of the seafront city of 100,000 people. Dozens of men dug through rubble from a hotel whose owner died in the quake, residents said.

Crowded parking lot

The city’s general hospital was overwhelmed, with doctors and nurses attending patients in tents in its crowded parking lot because there was no more room inside. Dozens lay on beds and mattresses on the grass outside the hospital. Inside, patients were on stretchers on the floor or on cots.

Babies were being transported out of the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit over concerns that the building was unsafe after the quake.

Dr Lucette Gedeon, a paediatrician, had been volunteering at the makeshift neonatal ward since Saturday and said the hospital had run out of antibiotics and anaesthetics.

Prime Minister Ariel Henry said there was no time to lose.

“From this Monday, we will move faster. Aid provision is going to be accelerated,” he wrote on Twitter. “We will multiply efforts tenfold to reach as many victims as possible with aid.”

Port-au-Prince airport on Monday bustled with medics and aid workers scrambling to get to the south with supplies.

In addition to damage to roads in the area, access to Les Cayes has been complicated by months of political turmoil in Haiti, which has left gangs in control of access routes to parts of the country.

The UN called for a “humanitarian corridor” to enable aid to pass through gang-held territories.

It was unclear whether presidential elections planned for November to draw a line under the political confusion since Moise was assassinated could be held.

At Les Cayes airport, ambulances brought the severely injured from nearby areas, a Reuters witness said. Casualties were carried on stretchers to small aircraft to be taken to Port-au-Prince, where hospital services were more intact.

With the phone network down in some areas, aid workers are still calibrating the damage. In difficult-to-reach villages, many houses were fragile and built on slopes vulnerable to landslides, said Alix Percinthe of the ActionAid charity.

Aid workers were hurrying to beat the onset of Tropical Depression Grace, which on Monday evening was moving west-northwest along southern Haiti, dumping heavy rain.

Some Haitians who lost their homes have been sleeping outdoors, many traumatised by memories of a magnitude 7 quake in 2010 that struck far closer to Port-au-Prince, killing more than 200,000 people.

Reuters