Second Haiti school collapse injures nine
PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) — A Port-au-Prince school partly collapsed Wednesday days after more than 90 were killed in another school cave-in, sparking a panic among parents of children in other risky schools and street protests over dangerous buildings.
Nine people were injured when walls at the small Grace Divine school in central Port-au-Prince partly gave way and the ceiling began to fall in, police said.
Students at the school, attended by about 100 pupils aged five to 12, were in the recreation yard when it happened, police said.
Hours after the news of the collapse came, panicked mothers rushed to other schools to pull out their children, fearing more disasters.
At least two children were hurt at one school when hundreds of kids were evacuated after some said they felt the building shaking. A public security official said the school would be closed because it did not meet standards.
The new school cave-in occurred as rescuers were still clearing the rubble and searching for bodies at La Promesse school in Petion-ville, a hillside shantytown outside Port-au-Prince, which collapsed last Friday while as many as 350 students were in classes.
The three-story school was completely destroyed, leaving 93 confirmed dead and 150 injured.
Rescuers still digging into the wreckage of shredded concrete and steel wire at la Promesse Tuesday said that there was little chance that there would be any more survivors pulled out, and government health officials were proceeding with operations to disinfect the site to protect against disease.
At Grace Divine school, chunks of the walls were scattered on the ground, its concrete roof was sagging, and there were clear cracks in the remaining walls.
Thousands of parents and onlookers flocked to the site, as rescuers backed up by foreign teams who arrived in the country to help with the La Promesse collapse arrived quickly at the scene to help.
The cause of the collapse was not immediately clear, but it came after heavy rains late Tuesday soaked the capital, and in the wake of several hurricanes which battered the country over the summer.
But there was also strong criticism of the lack of adequate government oversight of construction in the Caribbean country, one of the world’s poorest.
“Parliament must look into this and take tough and immediate measures to prevent more catastrophes of this type,” said MP Frantz Robert Monde.
“It is a problem of urban development in general,” Minister of Education Joel Desrosiers Jean-Pierre told AFP at the Grace Divine school site.
The government declared a day of mourning Thursday for the victims of the La Promesse tragedy, and a religious service was to be held in the village’s stadium.
The school’s head, evangelical pastor Augustin Fortain, was given a hearing Tuesday and transferred to a jail in Port-au-Prince, after turning himself in to police the day after the disaster.
Local residents said that Fortain, in his 50s, had undertaken the construction of La Promesse by himself rather than contract experts.
At the time of its collapse a fourth story was under construction on the school.
