The Prime Minister of Haiti has just announced that 212,000 bodies have been recovered.
“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,” Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told CNN from Haiti’s devastated capital Port-au-Prince.
But I believe that we can expect to see this number increase significantly, perhaps double. Here is why:
As my team and I with Rescue Haiti’s Children have travelled through the vast area destroyed by the January 12 earthquake, we have surveyed a good deal of the territory within an hour-and-a-half around the capital. We have seen that only the smallest fraction of the buildings are being touched by excavation and recovery teams.
In addition to the TWO MILLION homeless people dominating the landscape, one thing is abundantly clear—MOST of the tens of thousands of buildings affected by the earthquake have had little or no work done on them to recover bodies trapped deep inside. There simply are not enough machinery and crews, and the demolished Haitian government which has lost 80% of its infrastructure is not capable of bringing this mission to completion any time in the near future. It may be many months before even a quarter of the buildings are cleared of bodies. When all is said and done, we may see a body count closer to a half a million.