Even that didn’t clear things up. In the late afternoon, Preval and Lassegue appeared together at the government’s temporary headquarters.
Preval, speaking English, told journalists that the toll was 170,000, apparently referring to the number of bodies contained in mass graves.
Lassegue interrupted him in French, offering a number lower than she had given the previous day: “No, no, the official number is 210,000.’’
Preval dismissed her.
“Oh, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about,’’ he said, again in English.
There is no doubt that the death toll - whatever it is - is one of the highest in a modern disaster.
A third of Haiti’s 9 million people were crowded into the chaotic capital when the quake struck just to the southwest a few minutes before 5 p.m. Many were preparing to leave their offices or schools. Some 250,000 houses and 30,000 commercial buildings collapsed, many crushing people inside, according to government estimates.
For days, people piled bodies by the side of the road or left them half-buried under the rubble. Countless more remain under collapsed buildings.
No foreign government or independent agency has issued its own death toll. Many agencies that usually help estimate casualty numbers say they are too busy assisting the living to keep track of the dead. And the Joint Task Force in charge of the relief effort - foreign governments and militaries, UN agencies, and Haitian government officials - quotes only the government death toll.
That toll has climbed from a precise 111,481 on Jan. 23 to 150,000 on Jan. 24, to 212,000 on Saturday, to 230,000 on Tuesday. Preval’s count of 170,000 bodies buried in mass graves may represent only a piece of the toll - but nobody at his office was available to clarify.
It’s common in major disasters to see large discrepancies in death tolls: Governments may use lower figures to save face or higher figures to attract foreign aid. In Haiti’s case, however, where the very institutions responsible for compiling information were themselves devastated, reaching a death toll is particularly difficult.
