Haiti rocked by huge earthquake

The largest earthquake ever recorded in the area has rocked Haiti, collapsing a hospital and damaging other buildings.

An aid official described the situation as “total disaster and chaos”.

Communications were widely disrupted, making it impossible to get a clear picture of damage as powerful aftershocks shook a desperately poor country where many buildings are flimsy. Electricity was out in some places.

Karel Zelenka, a Roman Catholic Relief Services representative in the capital of Port-au-Prince, told US colleagues before phone service failed that “there must be thousands of people dead,” according to a spokeswoman for the aid group, Sara Fajardo.

“He reported that it was just total disaster and chaos, that there were clouds of dust surrounding Port-au-Prince,” Ms Fajardo said from the group’s offices in Maryland.

The earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.0 and was centred about 10 miles west of Port-au-Prince, the US Geological Survey said.

It had a depth of five miles. It was the largest quake recorded in the area and the first major one since a magnitude 6.7 quake in 1984, USGS analyst Dale Grant said.

The wrecked hospital is in Petionville, a hillside Port-au-Prince district that is home to many diplomats and wealthy Haitians, as well as many poor people.

Elsewhere in the capital, a US government official reported seeing houses that had tumbled into a ravine.

Haiti’s ambassador to the US, Raymond Joseph, said from his Washington office that he spoke to President Rene Preval’s chief of staff, Fritz Longchamp, just after the quake hit.

He said Mr Longchamp told him that “buildings were crumbling right and left” near the national palace. He said he had not been able to get through by phone to Haiti since.

Don Blakeman, an analyst at the USGS, said such a strong quake carried the potential for widespread damage.

“I think we are going to see substantial damage and casualties,” he said.

The earthquake’s size and proximity to populated Port-au-Prince likely caused widespread casualties and structural damage, added quake expert Tom Jordan at the University of Southern California.

“It’s going to be a real killer,” he said.

The quake appeared to have occurred along a strike-slip fault, where one side of a vertical fault slips horizontally past the other, Mr Jordan said.

“Whenever something like this happens, you just hope for the best,” he said. “The damage caused by this earthquake is not going to be pretty.”

Minor earthquakes are common in the Caribbean, but there has not been a major one in Haiti in 16 years.

The country of about nine million people, most of them desperately poor, has struggled with political instability and has no real construction standards.

In November 2008, following the collapse of a school in Petionville, the mayor of Port-au-Prince estimated about 60% of the buildings were shoddily built and unsafe in normal circumstances.

The quake was felt in the Dominican Republic, which shares a border with Haiti on the island of Hispaniola, and some panicked residents in the capital of Santo Domingo fled from their shaking homes. But no major damage was reported there.

In eastern Cuba, houses shook but there were also no reports of significant damage.