Haiti overcome by chaos of earthquake

from floridatoday.com:

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The largest earthquake in more than a century shattered Haiti on Tuesday, collapsing a hospital and homes and causing chaos in streets choked by a massive dust cloud.

"A huge billow of dust" caused by "buildings crashing down," hung over the capital Port-au-Prince, said Bill Canny, director of emergency operations for Catholic Relief Services.

Sara Fajardo, communications officer for Latin America and the Caribbean at CRS, said aid workers in the capital told her that "there must be thousands of people dead."

"It was just total disaster and chaos," she said.

Aid workers described scenes of desperation as people ran through traffic-choked streets and fallen buildings to find loved ones and carry them to hospitals, Canny said. Phone communications were overwhelmed. Power was out, and bodies lay in the streets, according to the State Department.

Kenson Calixte of Boston heard screaming as she talked on the phone to an uncle in Haiti who told her that a small hotel near their home had collapsed with people inside.

The earthquake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.0 and was centered about 10 miles west of Port-au-Prince, the U.S. Geological Survey said. The last quake of that magnitude to hit Haiti was in 1895, according to Bruce Presgrave of the U.S. Geological Survey.

An Associated Press videographer saw a wrecked hospital in Petionville, a hillside district that is home to diplomats and wealthy Haitians. Haiti's ambassador to the U.S., Raymond Joseph, said from Washington that he spoke to President René Préval's chief of staff, Fritz Longchamp, just after the quake hit. He said Longchamp told him that "buildings were crumbling right and left" near the national palace.

"I had one person describing to us a car split in half, a school that collapsed. It's mayhem at the moment," said UNICEF USA President Caryl Stern who talked to aid workers in Haiti.

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

Minor earthquakes are common in the Caribbean, but there has not been a major one in Haiti in 16 years. The quake was felt in the Dominican Republic, which shares a border with Haiti, and in Cuba, but there were no reports of significant damage.

"Everybody is just totally, totally freaked out and shaken," said Henry Bahn, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official visiting Port-au-Prince.

Bahn said there were rocks strewn about and he saw a ravine where several homes had stood: "It's just full of collapsed walls and rubble."