84 killed, 150 injured in Haitian school collapse

HAITI - Rescuers uncovered a classroom full of dead students Saturday after searching through the night for survivors of a school collapse in a Haitian shantytown which killed at least 84 people and left 150 injured, authorities said.

The three-story building caved in Friday morning during class, destroying neighboring homes and leaving scores of students and teachers trapped beneath huge slabs of cement and twisted steel rods.

As many as 700 students aged between three and 20 attended the church-run school on the outskirts of the capital Port-au-Prince, though it was unclear how many were inside when the building came crashing down.

As the death toll continued to rise, Haitian President Rene Preval warned that there was no telling how many more bodies might be found.

"This morning we found a classroom with 21 inside and they are all dead," said Preval, who along with Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis had rushed to the scene to oversee the rescue effort. "Right now we cannot say how many bodies we will have because the work is not yet finished." At the time of the collapse, builders had been adding a new floor atop the La Promesse school in Petion-ville, officials said.

Many frantic parents managed to return to the site on Saturday to look for their children despite the deployment of Haitian police and UN troops to keep them out. On the ground floor, bloodstains, small shoes, workbooks and writing left unfinished on the blackboard testify to the panic as students and teachers fled as the school began to crumble. In one classroom, 6F, two bodies are visible among the mass of concrete and mangled steel reinforcing rods.

Petion-Ville, Sunday AFP