One Year After Haiti's Quake: Rubble Clogs Capital, Cholera Babies
Photo Courtesy - ABC News(PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti) -- One year after a catastrophic 7.0 magnitude earthquake rocked Haiti, its capital, Port-au-Prince, is hard at work trying to rebuild itself.
Projects create dust on every street corner, but many are privately funded and done piecemeal, often using the same rusted rebar that failed Haitians the first time.
It is estimated about 700 million-cubic-feet of rubble have yet to be cleared, enough to fill six Superdomes. Only 10 percent of the rubble has been removed. It is Haiti's biggest challenge, Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerieve told ABC News Wednesday.
The prime minister said the bulk of the rubble cleared -- enough to open most of the city's shattered streets -- was paid for by the government, although most of the removal ABC News has witnessed in four trips over the past year resulted from private initiatives -- most often Haitians using shovels, picks and buckets.
Aside from rubble, the country is still facing many other challenges.
Bellerieve told ABC News the government has revised its previous estimate of the death toll from 230,000 to 316,000, meaning about three percent of Haiti's entire population died.
Haiti has yet to elect a new president, and it's voters continue to wait for the results of the disputed Nov. 29 elections. The runoff for the three putative front runners -- the wife of a former president, with scant political experience, a former hip hop star, and a government anointed successor with a checkered past -- has been postponed to March, all under the threat of violence.
Following the quake, Haiti was hit by Hurricane Tomas, rekindling a cholera outbreak that claimed the lives of over 3,600 people. Pregnant women and their newborns are still fighting and dying from the infection, and only one full service maternity hospital, run by the emergency relief group Doctors Without Borders, exists in the country.
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