Thousands feared dead in Haiti quake

“Parliament has collapsed,” Préval was quoted as saying. “The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed… All of the hospitals are packed with people,” he added. “It is a catastrophe.”

The quake was the worst in the region in more than 200 years and left the country in a shambles,without electricity or phone service,tangling efforts to provide relief to an estimated three million people who the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said had been affected by the quake.

US President Obama promised Haiti that the devastated island nation would have the “unwavering support” of the United States.

Obama said that US aid agencies were moving swiftly to get help to Haiti and that search-and-rescue teams were already en route. He urged Americans to dig into their pockets and to go to the White House website,www.whitehouse.gov,to find ways to donate money.

Five workers with the UN mission in Haiti were killed and more than 100 more missing after the office’s headquarters collapsed. The Tunisian head of the group’s Haitian mission,Hedi Annabi,and his deputy were among the missing,said Alain LeRoy,the UN peacekeeping chief. Earlier on Wednesday,French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on radio that the quake had killed Annabi.

The Brazilian Army,which has one of the largest peacekeeping presences in Haiti,said that four of its soldiers had been killed in the quake and five had been injured.

Paul McPhun,operations manager for Doctors Without Borders,described scenes of chaos. When staff members tried to travel by car “they were mobbed by crowds of people,” McPhun said. “They just want help,and anybody with a car is better off than they are.”

Aid workers and journalists in the neighboring Dominican Republic swarmed the airport in Santo Domingo,hoping to catch a few emergency flights into Haiti,and a spokesman for the UN humanitarian office said aid would be sent into the country on commercial flights.

The Port-au-Prince airport was open,but that the main road connecting it to the capital remained impassable. More than 30 significant aftershocks of a 4.5 magnitude or higher rattled Haiti through the night and into the early morning.

The quake struck just before 5 pm about 10 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince,the United States Geological Survey said. The quake could be felt across the border in the Dominican Republic.