Port-au-Prince, January 24: The confirmed death toll from Haiti’s devastating earthquake has topped 150 000 in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area alone, the communications minister said on Sunday, with many more thousands dead around the country or still buried under the rubble.
Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue told The Associated Press that the figure is based on a body count in the capital and outlying areas by CNE, a state company that has been collecting corpses and burying them in a mass grave north of Port-au-Prince. It does not include other affected cities such as Jacmel, where thousands are believed dead, nor does it account for bodies burned by relatives.
The United Nations said on Saturday the government had confirmed 111 481 bodies; all told, authorities have estimated 200 000 dead from the magnitude 7.0 quake, according to Haitian government figures cited by the European Commission.
“Nobody knows how many bodies are buried in the rubble – 200 000, 300 000?” Lassegue said. “Who knows the overall death toll?”
Experts say chances are slim that more survivors will be found in that debris, although rescuers pulled a man buried for 11 days in the wreckage [out] on Saturday.
Crews dug a tunnel through the rubble of a fruit and vegetable shop to reach Wismond Exantus, who is in his 20s. He was placed on a stretcher and given intravenous fluids as onlookers cheered, and later told the AP he survived by diving under a desk during the quake and later consuming some cola, beer and cookies in the cramped space.
“I was hungry, but every night I thought about the revelation that I would survive,” Exantus said from his hospital bed.
—Agencies