The 8-year-olds -- three girls and one boy -- were killed at Petite Ecole Francaise shortly after noon when dirt and boulders tumbled down from a mountain and into a wall that crashed through an elementary school classroom. The school in Carenage, a residential neighborhood in Cap-Haitien and sits at the bottom of a mountain. Many of the students come from well-to-do homes or have professional parents.
``It was madness,'' said Jess Lozier, coordinator for Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, who arrived at the scene an hour after the accident. Lozier's group works to provide sanitation, electricity and clean water to developing countries.
Haitian National Police officers and doctors from the group Help Haiti Heal scrambled to dig surviving children from the rubble, as did U.S. Army troops. It was not known how many other children were in the classroom at the time.
``The director of the school said all the other kids were accounted for,'' Lozier said.
Cap-Haitien had been experiencing heavy downpours for the past two days, and officials say more mudslides in a severely deforested Haiti are expected.
Also, city residents reported experiencing two small earthquakes overnight in Cap-Haitien and its surrounding villages, but the U.S. Geological Survey had no reports of earthquakes in Haiti's northern region, which sits on a different fault line than the one that triggered a magnitude-7 earthquake in the capital and several cities on Jan. 12, killing more than 200,000 Haitians.
In 2008, weeks after four back-to-back storms battered Haiti, a school in Port-au-Prince collapsed, killing 91 students and teachers, and injuring 162 when the College La Promesse Evangelique caved in. Many blamed poor construction on the collapse.
Charles reported from Miami and Daniel from Haiti. Herald Staff Writer Fred Tasker contributed to this report from Miami.
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