Bodies are being piled long the streets of Port-Au-Prince after a gigantic 7.0 magnitude earthquake destroyed churches, hospitals, schools, neighborhoods, and even the president’s palace.
The death toll is looking to surpass the Indian Ocean tsunamis of 2004, with members of the Haitian government estimating the cost in human lives at 500,000. You can watch video of the devastation here, showing the complete and utter devastation of the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, and aftershocks are still rattling the crippled nation.
The Boston Globe’s always-breathtaking photographers have published frighteningly tragic images from Haiti. Some of the images are a bit disturbing, so here’s your content warning.
Death was everywhere in Port-au-Prince. Bodies of tiny children were piled next to schools. Corpses of women lay on the street with stunned expressions frozen on their faces as flies began to gather. Bodies of men were covered with plastic tarps or cotton sheets.
President Rene Preval said he believes thousands were killed in Tuesday afternoon’s magnitude-7.0 quake, and the scope of the destruction prompted other officials to give even higher estimates. Leading Sen. Youri Latortue told The Associated Press that 500,000 could be dead, although he acknowledged that nobody really knows.
Keep the victims in your thoughts; your life isn’t that bad, you know.
UPDATE: The always cringe-worthy Pat Robertson has come forward claiming that when Haiti was under the control of the French “Napoleon the 3rd or whatever,” the Haitians made a pact with Satan in exchange for national liberation, which has resulted in poverty, disease, and by extension, this week’s horrific Earthquake.
Keep in mind this is the man concurred with Jerry Falwell as he blamed “abortionists,” pagans, feminists, the gays, the lesbians, and the ACLU for helping September 11th happen. Yeah…
UPDATE: Now Danny Glover of all people has cast his vote for what’s to blame for the earthquake in Haiti - any guesses? That’s right, climate change.
As if the obviously ridiculous face of his assertion wasn’t enough, his claim followed a head-tilting diatribe about creating “a partnership with Haiti, not one of dominance, not one in which, in which it tries to extract even more from the pain of the Haitian people.”
The punchline according to Glover :
“They [the Caribbean islands] are all in peril because of global warming, they’re all in peril because of climate change and all this… When we see what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you know what I’m sayin’?“
I guess “SUVs and coal factories caused the earthquake” is a more en vogue explanation than “God did it because Haitians are Satanists.” I think they’re both full of shit.
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