How Many Americans Killed In Haitian Quake?

By James Donahue

One of the strangely unanswered questions concerning the massive earthquake that hit Port au Prince and the surrounding area of Haiti on January 12 is the number of Americans killed.

The State Department reported to NBC News about a week after the disaster that there were still about 5,500 missing Americans in Haiti, but official American death counts were by then fragmented, with numbers of two killed in one building, and perhaps six in another.

While the word “missing” does not necessarily mean “dead” in a disaster scene as disoriented as found in Port au Prince, with communications disrupted, the prognosis for missing Americans may be grim.

Many of the missing Americans may be lost amid the clusters of bodies buried in mass graves in fields just outside of the city. But few, if any, news reports are touching on what appears to be the obvious.

With an estimated 200,000 or higher declared dead, and still more bodies being uncovered as the rubble is cleared, it appears that the total number of Americans killed in this single disaster may exceed all of the Americans killed in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the 9-11 attacks, combined.

A recent report stated that an estimated 250,000 people were wounded in Haiti, but there is no count as to how many of these are Americans.

One possible advantage the Americans in Haiti might have had was that if they were living in permanent housing, they may have been in more earthquake-proof structures. The reason so many Haitians perished was because they were living in poverty and their homes were no more than shacks erected on top of each other.

The ominous part of the story is that so many thousands of Americans, known to have been living and working in Haiti, have not been accounted for.

This event is clearly going down in history as one of the worst disasters ever, for both Haitians and the United States.