Haitians wait for daylight for full look at quake devastationhttp://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/01/13/haiti.earthquake/index.html(CNN) -- After the earth shook more violently in Haiti than it has in two centuries, its citizens hunkered down for the night, awaiting daylight Wednesday to ascertain the full scope of death and devastation.
The United States and global humanitarian agencies said they would to begin administering aid on Wednesday amid fears that impoverished Haiti, already afflicted with human misery, was facing nothing short of a catastrophe.
No estimate of the dead and wounded was given Tuesday evening, but the U.S. State Department had been told to expect "serious loss of life," spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters in Washington.
"The only thing I can do now is pray and hope for the best," the Haitian ambassador to the United States, Raymond Joseph, told CNN.
The grim list of Tuesday's destruction included the U.N. peacekeeper compound, a five-story building where about 250 people work every day.
Three Jordanian peacekeepers died and an additional 21 were injured, according to the state-run Petra News Agency.
Limited communications hampered reports of casualties and destruction. But the quake had reportedly brought down The Hotel Montana, popular with foreigners visiting Port-au-Prince. French Minister of Cooperation Alain Joyandet expressed concern Wednesday for the approximately 200 French tourists staying there.
Night fell a few hours after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Tuesday, reducing buildings as grand as the National Palace to rubble and knocking down phone and power lines.
The wounded, white with dust, filled the streets. Women clutched their babies, desperate to find help. Others stretched their arms skyward, calling out Jesus' name.
Communication with people in Haiti was, at best, sketchy and achieved mainly through social networking sites such as Twitter and YouTube and via Internet phone.
"Everybody is camping in the streets of Port-au-Prince sleeping under the stars to wake up from an awful nightmare," photographer Frederic Dupoux wrote in a Twitter post early Wednesday.
"It's really ugly, just like in a bad dream," he had written earlier. "People need help, get out and help!"
The faithful prayed late into the evening -- for relief, for mercy, for safety -- as at least 28 aftershocks of magnitude of 4.0 or greater rumbled across the country. The quake was centered about 10 kilometers (six miles) underground, a depth that can produce severe shaking, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
With darkness, an uneasy quiet descended.
"The singing and praying I was hearing earlier has died down," Richard Morse, hotel manager at the Oloffson Hotel in the capital, Port-au-Prince, wrote in a Twitter post.
"No helicopters. No sound of ambulances. ... When my batteries die, I will no longer be able to communicate. Looks like it's going to be a long night."
Several witnesses reported heavy damage and bodies in the streets of the congested capital, where concrete-block homes line the steep hillsides leading inland from the city's waterfront.
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