{"id":7814,"date":"2010-01-13T22:57:17","date_gmt":"2010-01-14T03:57:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=7814"},"modified":"2010-01-13T22:57:17","modified_gmt":"2010-01-14T03:57:17","slug":"haitian-haste","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=7814","title":{"rendered":"Haitian Haste"},"content":{"rendered":"

With news filtering out of Haiti as slowly as aid is effectively able to get in, the scale of the massive earthquake’s destruction <\/a>is still hard to determine.\u00a0 For a country already in political and economic ruin, magnitude-7 quake destroyed most of Port-au-Prince, leaving estimates as high as 500,000 dead and perhaps as many as 3 million in need of emergency aid:<\/p>\n

Tuesday’s earthquake brought down buildings great and small \u2014 from shacks in shantytowns to President Rene Preval<\/span>‘s gleaming white National Palace<\/span>, where a dome tilted ominously above the manicured grounds.<\/p>\n

Hospitals, schools and the main prison collapsed. The capital’s Roman Catholic archbishop was killed when his office and the main cathedral fell. The head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission<\/span> was missing in the ruins of the organization’s multistory headquarters.<\/p>\n

Police officers turned their pickup trucks into ambulances to carry the injured. Wisnel Occilus, a 24-year-old student, was wedged between two other survivors in a truck bed headed to a police station. He was in an English class when the earth shook at 4:53 p.m. and the building collapsed.<\/p>\n

“The professor is dead. Some of the students are dead, too,” said Occilus, who suspected he had several broken bones. “Everything hurts.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To put Haiti’s most recent tragedy into perspective, the earthquake may already rank as one of the deadliest in history<\/a>.\u00a0 Only Shaanxi in China’s 1556 earthquake may have been worse with an unconfirmed 830,000 dead, but with the inaccurate of historical records, the 1976 Tangshan earthquake and it’s official death-toll of 255,000 ranks as the worst of the modern era and likely the most deadly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are many fine organizations assisting survivors in Haiti, but I would encourage SITD’s loyal readers to consider donating to the International Red Cross <\/a>in this hour of need.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With news filtering out of Haiti as slowly as aid is effectively able to get in, the scale of the massive earthquake’s destruction is still hard to determine.\u00a0 For a country already in political and economic ruin, magnitude-7 quake destroyed most of Port-au-Prince, leaving estimates as high as 500,000 dead and perhaps as many as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":425,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105,73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-ringer","category-western-civilization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/425"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7814"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7815,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7814\/revisions\/7815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}