— Four children died and eight were seriously injured Monday after
heavy rains triggered mudslides that crashed into a classroom in
The 8-year-olds — three boys and one girl — were
killed at Petite Ecole Francaise shortly after noon when dirt and
boulders tumbled down from a mountain and into a wall that crashed
through an elementary school classroom. The school, in Carenage, a
residential neighborhood in Cap-Haitien, sits at the bottom of a
mountain. Many of the students come from well-to-do homes or have
professional parents.
“It was madness,” said
who arrived at the scene an hour after the accident. Lozier’s group
works to provide sanitation, electricity and clean water to developing
countries.
It was not known how many other children were in the classroom at the time.
“The director of the school said all the other kids were accounted for,” Lozier said.
Cap-Haitien had been experiencing heavy downpours
for the past two days, and officials say more mudslides in a severely
deforested
Also, city residents reported experiencing two small earthquakes overnight in Cap-Haitien and its surrounding villages, but the
northern region, which sits on a different fault line than the one that
triggered a magnitude 7.0 earthquake in the capital and several cities
on
In 2008, weeks after four back-to-back storms battered
Many blamed poor construction on the collapse.
—
(c) 2010, The Miami Herald.
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Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
