Thousands of unidentified corpses in Haiti may be laid to rest in mass graves

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HAITI EARTHQUAKE

Thousands of unidentified corpses in Haiti may be laid to rest in mass graves

By FRANCES ROBLES, MICHAEL SALLAH AND ROB BARRY
Posted on Friday, 01.15.10
<!-- begin /production/story/credit_line_format.comp -->msallah@MiamiHerald.com

<!-- end /production/story/credit_line_format.comp -->PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- -- Just before dawn, the bodies began arriving -- wrapped in sheets of plastic -- and pulled off pickups and makeshift stretchers at a morgue that was already overflowing before disaster struck Tuesday evening.

Within hours, the corpses were strewn across the gray brick courtyard outside the drab one-story building that houses the city's dead.

Amid the muffled cries of survivors searching for parents and children, workers began the grim task of burying those who perished in Tuesday's devastating earthquake that ripped through the impoverished capital.

For a country that has never been able to provide proper burials for its destitute, burying the estimated 45,000 to 50,000 may be Haiti's greatest challenge.

Read more at:
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/haiti/story/1426724.html

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Re: Thousands of unidentified corpses in Haiti may be laid to rest in mass graves

Haiti Tries to Dig Out as Corpses Pile Up

By IOAN GRILLO / PORT-AU-PRINCE Friday, Jan. 15, 2010


Bodies are piled up in the street, obstructing traffic, as people start trying to cope with massive destruction in Port-au-Prince following Tuesday's massive earthquake
Shaul Schwarz / Reportage by Getty for TIME


Like a thick fog, the stench of death curdles the air in the streets of this shattered city. It comes from trundling trucks, where corpses are piled up and covered by bloodstained sheets, while young men with scarves on their faces warn onlookers to stand aside. It is expelled from pyres of burning tires that incinerate cadavers that have remained unattended too long in the dust and heat, lit by residents afraid that the carrion will attract prowling dogs and endanger children. And it surges through piles of rocks and rubble, where hospitals, schools, palaces and homes fell like cards as the ground shook with the fiercest earthquake to strike this island in two centuries.

No one can tell how many have perished, and the exact number of dead will be almost certainly never be known. Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? The panorama of destruction appears endless. Street to street, neighborhood to neighborhood, ever more shattered buildings, wounded survivors and decaying corpses can be found. In one alley, two bodies lie across from a group of teenagers sitting and chatting. Around the corner, dozens of cadavers are piled in the remnants of a government building that reportedly had 1,000 employees. Photographer Shaul Schwarz, on assignment for TIME, saw corpses piled on the street impeding traffic.

Complete text at:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1953379_1953494_1953865,00.html

[AlaskaDenise]

Re: Thousands of unidentified corpses in Haiti may be laid to rest in mass graves

Photos of the dead, their treatment, disposal, etc., are far too similar to the London plague of 1665. 350 years later, modern technology, and we can't do better than 1665???

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Re: Thousands of unidentified corpses in Haiti may be laid to rest in mass graves

Jan 15, 2010
HAITI QUAKE

Brazil offers Voodoo cemetery

BRASILIA - BRAZIL is offering to build a cemetery in Haiti for the thousands killed in this week's quake, and promising it will respect the Voodoo beliefs of part of the Caribbean country's population, officials said on Thursday.

The proposal stemmed from the 'great concern over the presence of abandoned bodies in the streets, which could create epidemics', the defence ministry said in a statement.

'Some people are burying their dead on the sides of hills, which risks the corpses emerging when it rains,' it noted. 'A special attention will be given to adherents of Voodoo, a religion with a strong following in Haiti,' the statement said.

One of the considerations in that regard is that 'relatives do not accept that anybody touches their dead until their rituals are over'.

Voodoo was brought to Haiti from Africa during the time of slavery. A version of it called Candomble exists in Brazil, which also became home to a large African slave population.

More at:

http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/World/Story/STIStory_477620.html

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Re: Thousands of unidentified corpses in Haiti may be laid to rest in mass graves

Where bodies go after natural disasters

By Madison Park, CNN<script type="text/javascript">cnnAuthor = "By Madison Park, CNN";</script>
<script type="text/javascript">if(location.hostname.indexOf( 'edition.' ) > -1) {document.write('January 16, 2010 -- Updated 1421 GMT (2221 HKT)');} else {document.write('January 16, 2010 9:21 a.m. EST');}</script>January 16, 2010 9:21 a.m. ESTJanuary 16, 2010 9:21 a.m. ESTJanuary 16, 2010 9:21 a.m. EST


(CNN) -- Four days after Haiti's massive earthquake, efforts are under way to bury the dead as thousands of bodies crumpled in the streets of Port-au-Prince lay exposed to the sun or draped in sheets and cardboard.

Throughout the city, people covered their noses from the stench and some resorted to face masks. CNN correspondents in Haiti reported efforts to remove the bodies, including the creation of a mass grave. It's still unclear how many people have been killed in Tuesday's earthquake; the prime minister suggested there could be several hundreds of thousands.

CNN's Anderson Cooper, reporting Friday from a mass grave on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, described seeing hundreds of bodies mixed with garbage in open pits. Some bodies were bulldozed into the half-filled pits.

"These people will vanish," Cooper said in a phone report. "No one will know what happened to them. That's one of the many horrors.

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"We have a significant loss of life; we have people that are unknown; we have a significant number of missing people. The one minor difference in Thailand was that it was isolated to shoreline about a mile in. Here you have total destruction of an infrastructure system."

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/01/14/haiti.mass.fatalities.bodies/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

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Re: Thousands of unidentified corpses in Haiti may be laid to rest in mass graves

<TABLE class=gallery-slideshow-table><TBODY><TR><TD align=middle>

</TD></TR><TR><TD>Haiti earthquake


(Gerald Herbert / Associated Press / January 16, 2010) Haitians cover their faces to avoid the smell of decaying bodies on a street in Port-au-Prince. While workers are burying in mass graves some of the tens of thousands of victims from Tuesday's earthquake, countless bodies remain unclaimed in the streets.

<TABLE class=gallery-slideshow-table><TBODY><TR><TD align=middle>

</TD></TR><TR><TD>Pyre


(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times / January 16, 2010) A man feeds a fire he set to burn a corpse in downtown Port-au-Prince four days after the earthquake. Residents have started to take action on their own because bodies haven't been picked up and the stench is overwhelming. The deceased was a street vendor who was killed when a cement block fell on her, according to those who were around her.

<TABLE class=gallery-slideshow-table><TBODY><TR><TD align=middle>

</TD></TR><TR><TD>Bodies in Haiti


(Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times / January 14, 2010) Bodies lie outside the morgue at the main hospital in Port-au-Prince, the shattered Haitian capital. The number of bodies stacked outside the morgue was estimated to be more than 1,000.

<TABLE class=gallery-slideshow-table><TBODY><TR><TD align=middle>

</TD></TR><TR><TD>Bodies in Haiti


(Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times / January 14, 2010) Bodies that had been stacked along a roadside in Port-au-Prince are loaded onto a truck to be transported to the morgue at the main hospital in the Haitian capital.


</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>


</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>


</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>

<TABLE class=gallery-slideshow-table><TBODY><TR><TD align=middle>

</TD></TR><TR><TD>Coffin


(Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times / January 14, 2010) Men carry an empty coffin away after discovering that the body of their dead relative had already been moved. They ended up selling the coffin to another family who needed it.


</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-haiti-earthquake-pictures,0,5859695.photogallery

</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>

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Re: Thousands of unidentified corpses in Haiti may be laid to rest in mass graves

Haitian prime minister defends handling of the dead

THE MIAMI HERALD | BY JACQUELINE CHARLES, JEAN-CYRIL PRESSOIR AND ELINOR J. BRECHER | <ABBR class=updated title=2010-01-17T23:12:01-05:00>Sun, Jan 17, 11:12 PM</ABBR>

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- In Haiti, funerals are as expensive as weddings, tombs often more elaborate than the homes of the living.
Yet thousands -- victims of Haiti's worst natural disaster -- are now being shoveled into mass graves.

On Sunday, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said that government workers -- road crews in ordinary times -- had collected and buried 70,000 bodies, all but 5,000 from the capital city, Port-au-Prince.

At first, they tried to identify the dead. Now they're merely counting them. They keep a running tally on sheets of paper as they scoop the corpses with loaders and deposit them in dump trucks, said Jude Celestin, head of the National Center of Equipment, the Haitian government's road construction company.

Reluctant to give a final figure, the government thinks the toll could rise to 100,000; authorities have yet to make their way to areas within the capital and outside that suffered mass casualties.

"Until we get to the slums, the dense population, we won't know" the number exactly, Bellerive said.

Right after Tuesday's earthquake, those who could afford to bought pretty caskets, draped them with flowers and drove their dead to a crematory or family plots.

Those who couldn't afford to burned the bodies themselves.
Initially, the dead were wrapped tightly in pink and white sheets stripped from beds or salvaged from the rubble, and gingerly placed on sidewalks.

Now, relatives who might have spent days digging for their dead are letting workers haul them away.

The unceremonious disposals are generating criticism, but Bellerive defended them, saying that "people don't realize that we didn't know we had to collect 70,000 bodies in five days ... . I believe no country would be prepared for that."

Full text at:

http://dailyme.com/story/2010011700004142/haitian-prime-minister-defends-handling-dead.html

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Re: Thousands of unidentified corpses in Haiti may be laid to rest in mass graves

Haiti's voodoo priests object to mass burials

Joseph Guyler Delva
Sun Jan 17, 2010 5:20pm EST

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - Haiti's voodoo priests are objecting to anonymous mass burials as an improper way to handle the tens of thousands of dead from the earthquake -- and have taken their complaint to President Rene Preval.

Dumping the dead in hurriedly excavated mass graves without proper rites is seen as desecration in a country where many believe in zombies -- dead bodies brought back to life by supernatural forces who could persecute the living.

Haitian officials say so far at least 50,000 bodies have been dumped in mass graves outside the shattered capital, Port-au-Prince, in what they view as the most efficient way to dispose of the fast-rotting corpses from Tuesday's disaster.

"It is not in our culture to bury people in such a fashion," Haiti's main voodoo leader, Max Beauvoir, said in a meeting with Preval.

Local radio is broadcasting messages for Haitians to put bodies recovered from under the rubble of collapsed buildings on the street for collection by garbage and other trucks.

"The conditions in which bodies are being buried is not respecting the dignity of these people," Beauvoir, who was educated at City College of New York and the Sorbonne in Paris, said in the Preval meeting this weekend.

More than half of Haiti's 9 million people are believed to practice voodoo, a religion with roots in Africa. Some 80 percent also are Catholic and most Haitians see no conflict between the two.

Full article at:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60G2DF20100117

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Re: Thousands of unidentified corpses in Haiti may be laid to rest in mass graves

By the thousands, Haiti returns dead to the earth

By PAUL HAVEN

TITANYEN, Haiti ? They stick out at all angles from the tall mounds of chalky dirt, the limbs of men, women and children frozen together in poses of death.

Tens of thousands more killed in Haiti's catastrophic quake lie beneath the earth in mass graves cut into this wide green hillside north of Port-au-Prince, buried anonymously and without ceremony above the turquoise waters of the Caribbean Sea.

And each day, the dead keep coming.

"I received 10,000 bodies yesterday alone," said Foultone Fequiert, 38, who was operating an earth-moving machine at one of the graves, his face covered with a T-shirt that seemed little defense against the overwhelming stench.

"I have seen so many children, so many children. I cannot sleep at night, and, if I do, it is a constant nightmare."

Despite pleas from the world that every effort be made to identify Haiti's dead, and that they be buried in shallow graves from which loved ones might eventually retrieve them, workers say there is simply no time for that - and little point.

"We just dump them in, and fill it up," said Luckner Clerzier, 39, who was helping guide trucks to another grave site farther up the road.

"If we took pictures of them you wouldn't be able to recognize them anyway," he said, gesturing toward a pile of bloated bodies baking under the hot midday sun, many tangled together in a terrible contorted embrace. The hands and feet of other victims stuck out of the ground around them.

Clerzier said workers had made every effort to cover the bodies fully, but that it had proved impossible.

"There are just too many," he said, his shadow falling on the remains of a naked infant lying on the ground a few yards from the larger mounds.

More at http://www.journalgazette.net/articl...API/1001201628

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Re: Thousands of unidentified corpses in Haiti may be laid to rest in mass graves

Haiti?s Many Troubles Keep Bodies Uncounted

By SIMON ROMERO and NEIL MacFARQUHAR
</NYT_BYLINE>Published: January 20, 2010
<NYT_TEXT>

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti ? Dr. Alix Lassegue, the physician who runs this city?s largest hospital, including its morgue, has been trying to figure out how many people died after the earth buckled so violently last week.

Unlike most of the rough figures bandied about, Dr. Lassegue?s are based on actual calculations. Standing amid the frenzy of patients being treated in every direction, he jotted down a few numbers with a pen.

The asphalt grounds in front of the morgue are roughly 1,000 square yards, with each body occupying about one square meter. Trucks have carted away the dead 10 times, which means about 10,000 bodies removed for burial.

?This, too, is not a perfect count,? Dr. Lassegue said. ?But it is the best that I can arrive at given our current limitations. We must not attach ourselves to wild estimates, but try to get at the best figures possible.?
Wild estimates are not hard to find. Steps away, where morgue employees were cleaning the asphalt with hoses and brooms, one employee said 75,000 bodies had passed through; a second said 50,000; a third, 25,000.

The simple truth is that no accurate figure exists. In disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 Asian tsunami and the 2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran, the toll habitually swings way up at first, taking a couple of weeks to settle at a final, accepted number.

More at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/world/americas/21deathtoll.html

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Re: Thousands of unidentified corpses in Haiti may be laid to rest in mass graves

Haiti's mass graves spell indignity in death

By Rene Bruemmer, Montreal GazetteFebruary 2, 2010


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A basic white cross marks one of the mass grave sites for victims of a 7-magnitude earthquake that rocked Haiti on January 12th killing between 150,000 and 200,000 people. Several trenches remain open waiting for those uncovered during demolition and brought to the site on a dry rolling hill side in the Sav

Photograph by: THE GAZETTE/Allen McInnis,

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — In the slowly reviving streets of the shattered Haitian capital, it is strangely easy to forget the overwhelming human tragedy that occurred here just three weeks ago.

The backdrop of collapsed buildings and houses becomes familiar over time, a uniform grey mass of concrete and steel fading in behind a foreground of trucks, cars and motorcycles whizzing to and fro, as pedestrians in well-laundered shirts make their way past the ubiquitous street vendors selling their wares and services.

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http://www.calgaryherald.com/Haiti+mass+graves+spell+indignity+death/2514629/story.html