The Associated Press
 AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa People help a person out from under the rubble of a school after it collapsed in Haiti Friday. A concrete school building collapsed during classes, killing at least 30 people. |
PETIONVILLE, Haiti — International rescue teams joined the search for survivors yesterday in the rubble of a Haitian school that collapsed on classrooms filled with students and teachers, killing at least 88 people.
Thousands of hopeful Haitians crowded around the school in the Port-au-Prince suburb, cheering and shouting directions as searchers dug through the remnants of College La Promesse, occasionally finding survivors a day after it collapsed. Trucks carrying oxygen and other medical supplies rumbled up the mountainside.
Angelique Toussaint kept vigil on a rooftop overlooking the rubble and prayed that her 13-year-old granddaughter, Velouna, would be saved. Her three other grandchildren were found alive on Friday, while another granddaughter underwent an operation for a severely broken leg.
Dressed in her white church clothes, the 55-year-old Roman Catholic said she attended a group prayer for missing children the night before. Velouna’s parents had gone home, exhausted from the oppressive heat and endless waiting as rescuers struggled to move the massive concrete slabs that remained.
Roughly 500 children and teenagers typically crowded into Petionville’s three-story school building.
Local authorities used bare hands to pull bleeding students from the wreckage before heavy equipment and international teams began arriving yesterday.
Nearly 40 search-and-rescue officials from Fairfax County, Va., arrived to help rescuers.
“I see a dramatic turnabout in the situation once they’re here because these guys are the real experts,” said Alexandre Deprez, acting director of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Haiti. “We’ve done everything we’ve possibly can practically from the first hour.”
France also sent a team of 15 firefighters and doctors with two rescue dogs.
Some parents clutched pictures of their children as they watched rescue workers sidestep the limbs of dead people sticking out under the rubble.
Riot police chased away several Haitians who had found their way around the yellow tape and began excavating themselves.
President Rene Preval said poor construction, including a lack of steel reinforcement, was to blame for Friday’s collapse of the concrete building.
Preval told The Associated Press that structures throughout Haiti are at similar risk because of poor construction and a lack of government oversight.
“It’s not just schools, it’s where people live, it’s churches,” he said at the site of the collapse as crews picked through the wreckage in search of more victims.
Doctors Without Borders was treating more than 80 people, many with serious injuries, said Francois Servranckx, a spokesman for the aid group.
Preval said a previous mayor of Petionville had tried to halt the expansion of La Promesse over safety concerns, but the effort faltered when a new mayor came into power in the hillside suburb of the capital.
Parents said they toiled endlessly throughout the year to afford the school’s $1,500 tuition in hopes of empowering their children to someday escape poverty.
Haiti, the poorest and most politically tumultuous country in the Western Hemisphere, has been struggling to recover this year from riots over rising food prices and a string of hurricanes and tropical storms that killed nearly 800 people.