By Calvin Palmer
Rescuers this morning uncovered a classroom containing 21 dead students in the collapsed school building in Haiti. The grim discovery brought the number of dead to 84, according to the AFP news agency. More than 150 others have been injured.
The three-story La Promesse school in Petionville, on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, caved in yesterday morning in a heap of cement slabs and twisted steel rods trapping dozens of pupils inside.
A new story had been under construction atop the school when it fell in, also destroying or damaging five homes next to it.
As the death toll continued to rise, Haitian President Rene Preval warned that there was no telling how many more bodies might be found.
“This morning we found a classroom with 21 inside — students and their professor — and they are all dead,” said Preval, who along with Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis had rushed to the scene to oversee the rescue effort.
“Right now we cannot say how many bodies we will have because the work is not yet finished.”
In Washington, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) said search and rescue teams were en route to the scene, due to arrive this morning.
“This is a tragic situation, especially since children are involved. We are working alongside the Haitian government to provide immediate assistance in the rescue efforts,” said USAID Administrator Henrietta Fore.
In Paris, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner expressed his “deep emotion” over the tragedy and promised to send “as soon as possible a civil security team to help the Haitian authorities in rescuing the victims who are still buried.”
The school, which has kindergarten facilities through to high school, has 500 pupils. The Mayor of Petionville, Claire Rudie Parent, said she didn’t know how many pupils were in the school when it collapsed.
Parent said she suspected a structural defect caused the second story of the school to collapse on to the first. She doubted that recent rains had contributed to the collapse. An investigation is to be launched.
[Based on reports by the AFP news agency, the Associated Press and BBC News.]
