B.C. families await news from Haiti

Residents in the Kootenay region of southeastern B.C. are anxiously awaiting news from a local school group that arrived in Haiti just hours before a devastating earthquake rocked the country's capital city, Port-au-Prince, on Tuesday.

School officials say they have been able to make contact with the group. It includes about 18 students, and up to eight teachers, parents and volunteers from the Mount Sentinel School and Kootenay Christian Fellowship group in South Slocan, west of Nelson. Officials are working to get the students home as quickly as possible. 

The students arrived in the country as part of a school program to help set up a farm just hours before the 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck just west of Port-au-Prince Tuesday afternoon, killing and injuring thousands of people and destroying the area's already weak infrastructure.

One of the students was on the phone with a parent in Nelson when the quake hit and the line went dead, said Pat Dooley, the superintendent of the Nelson School District. The parents panicked for several hours, before the group was able to make contact with the students again.

The student reportedly spent the night sleeping in a bus after making it safely to the American-based Lifeline Mission compound in Grand-Goave, about 50 kilometres west of Port-au-Prince, according to an email sent to back to the wife of a mission member in Calgary. 

"Marc [Honart with Haiti Arise] brought the team here to Lifeline because of some concern about the safety in the structure at your mission," said the email. "They are all fine ... sleeping in our buses tonight and someone (probably Marc) had brought them chicken and food to eat. They are doing OK, and I expect they'll make it back to your place tomorrow. But everyone is fine!"

Dooley said the parents want their children home, and the school district will make that happen as soon as possible.

"I guess our first step is to determine what are the barriers, what are the possibilities, and you know, how do we move forward," said Dooley. "I imagine there are going to be a number of people who do want to get out of Haiti, and so it's just a case of figuring out what is going to prevent us from getting students home."

Many await news

Meanwhile, many other B.C. residents are desperately trying to reach family and friends in Haiti.

Alain Vincent, a pharmacist in Victoria who has family in Haiti, said he was unable to reach his brother by phone but did get an email early Wednesday morning saying that his brother and family are OK.

But Vincent's brother told him there is major damage to his home in Port-au-Prince.

Many buildings in the capital are made of concrete blocks and not built to withstand earthquakes. News video out of Haiti shows that many of the capital's structures have collapsed, but Vincent said he expects rural areas will likely be affected as well.

"In the provinces and the slums in the poorest areas, you have very, very light construction — sheet metals and cardboard. The problem is not the construction crashing down, but the house falling down into ravines because they are mainly in mountainous areas," he said.

Stuart Hammond is a PhD student at Simon Fraser University who just returned from Haiti. He's been trying to reach a friend who has been volunteering at a pregnancy clinic near the quake's epicentre.

"I haven't been able to reach her at all.," Hammond said. "Unfortunately, I was emailing with her just about an hour before this all happened, and I tried immediately to call her after that, but as a lot of media outlets are reporting, the phone lines in Haiti seem totally cut right now."

Vancouver Island resident Robert Terris has two adopted sons from Haiti and many friends in that country, but he hasn't been able to reach any of his friends and says the gravity of the quake's impact has yet to sink in.

"I don't think the actual impact of what happened has really hit anyone yet," he said. "[I'm] not really looking forward to the next few days."

Surrey resident Garry Auguste estimates about 50 of his relatives live in the quake zone, but he hasn't heard from a single one of them.

"My mother's still there, I have one sister still there, and two brothers," Auguste said. "None of us is able to reach anybody right now. Whichever network we're using, it's giving the same message, so it's been difficult."

Auguste worries what news the coming days will bring, saying building codes in his native country are all but non-existent and he fears aftershocks could topple many more buildings.