Tens of thousands of people were feared dead in Haiti's catastrophic
earthquake, with many buried or trapped in demolished schools,
hospitals and hillside shanties in the impoverished capital.
Asked by a CNN reporter how many people had died, President Rene Preval replied "I don't know", adding "up to now, I heard 50,000 ... 30,000."
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But Preval did not say where the estimates came from.
The local Red Cross -- used to dealing with disaster in a country long
dogged by poverty and political instability -- said it was overwhelmed.
A five-story U.N. headquarters building was destroyed by Tuesday's 7.0 magnitude quake, which the U.S. Geological Survey said was the most powerful in Haiti in more than a century. The U.N. said at least 14 members of its 9,000-strong peacekeeping mission had been killed. Preval said mission chief Hedi Annabi was dead but the U.N. could not confirm that.
Preval called the damage "unimaginable" and described stepping over dead bodies and hearing the cries of those trapped in the collapsed Parliament building, where the senate president was among those pinned by debris. Destruction in the capital was "massive and broad," and tens -- if not hundreds -- of thousands of homes were destroyed, a spokesman for the U.N. mission said.
Voices cried out from the rubble. "Please take me out, I am dying. I have two children with me," a woman told a Reuters journalist from under a collapsed kindergarten in the Canape-Vert area of the capital. The presidential palace lay in ruins, its domes fallen on top of flattened walls. Preval and his wife were not inside when the quake hit.
A five-story U.N. headquarters building was destroyed by Tuesday's 7.0 magnitude quake, which the U.S. Geological Survey said was the most powerful in Haiti in more than a century. The U.N. said at least 14 members of its 9,000-strong peacekeeping mission had been killed. Preval said mission chief Hedi Annabi was dead but the U.N. could not confirm that.
Preval called the damage "unimaginable" and described stepping over dead bodies and hearing the cries of those trapped in the collapsed Parliament building, where the senate president was among those pinned by debris. Destruction in the capital was "massive and broad," and tens -- if not hundreds -- of thousands of homes were destroyed, a spokesman for the U.N. mission said.
Voices cried out from the rubble. "Please take me out, I am dying. I have two children with me," a woman told a Reuters journalist from under a collapsed kindergarten in the Canape-Vert area of the capital. The presidential palace lay in ruins, its domes fallen on top of flattened walls. Preval and his wife were not inside when the quake hit.
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