Haiti quake death toll reaches 212,000

5 Feb 2010, 3:57 pm   -   Source: AAP
Share This

The death toll from Haiti's catastrophic earthquake last month has reached 212,000, the nation's prime minister says.

The death toll from Haiti's catastrophic earthquake last month has reached 212,000, the nation's prime minister says.

Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive also told CNN that the number of homeless may be far higher than the one million estimated by authorities.

"We have over 200,000 (dead). The last number I received from my services was 212,000 people that were collected on the streets and different places," he said on Thursday.

Bellerive said the toll, already the highest on record from any natural disaster in the Americas, was likely to rise "a little bit" higher as recovery crews pull bodies from locations where demolition had been delayed while rescue teams searched for survivors.

He also said more than 300,000 people had been injured in the disaster, and that most of them had received medical attention.

Authorities had said about one million people were made homeless when the 7.0-magnitude quake struck the impoverished Caribbean nation on January 12, out of a national population of roughly nine million.

"But you have to add to that number the people that before the events of January were already homeless and that are regrouping with the people that are new on this," Bellerive told the US cable network.

"So you should have around two million people on the streets right now."

Aid groups have set up several refugee camps in and around Port-au-Prince, and the government has announced plans to relocate hundreds of thousands of Haitians out of the makeshift camps into new temporary shelters outside the capital.

Meanwhile, a helicopter believed to be involved in aid operations in Haiti has crashed in the western Dominican Republic, killing the two men aboard.

"Up to now we have two bodies, the pilot and co-pilot," said Dominican Civil Aeronautics Institute spokesman Pedro Jimenez.

The nationality of the two killed on Thursday night (local time) was not immediately clear.

The R44 helicopter, a light four-seat civil aircraft produced by the Robinson Helicopter Company of the United States, crashed in the province of Dajabon, 305 kilometres northwest of the capital Santo Domingo, Jimenez said.

The aircraft was en route from the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince to Santiago, in the northern Dominican Republic.

"Apparently it was one of those helicopters involved in the rescue in Haiti," said Jimenez.

Authorities launched an investigation into the crash although it appears the pilots did not inform air traffic controllers of any flight difficulties.

  • Follow us: 
  • Follow us on Facebook
  • Follow us on Twitter
  • Follow us on Youtube