GeoEye Haiti Satellite Pics, Before and After, Haiti in Turmoil

by Amy Judd | January 14, 2010 at 09:36 am

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The GeoEye Haiti Satellite images released to the public show just how much destruction happened to the capital building in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and how much work is going to have to be done to rebuild the country. The left image shows rubble, while the one on the right displays the palace as it stood about a year and a half ago.

The death toll from the Haiti earthquake is rising and with the bodies piling up in the streets and very little food or water and no electricity, the people of Haiti are starting to despair and as the tensions grown, the possibility for violence could as well. Haiti is a country in turmoil.

People have no place to live anymore and so are sleeping on the streets and in parks and don't want to move inside for fear of another earthquake or aftershock. Gunfire has also been reported.

Sporadic gunfire was heard Wednesday night outside the hotel where CNN is lodged.

There have been reports of looting in the capital as well, as people discarded their belongings and when they come back for them it is all gone. People who were roaming the streets and dropped their things they could no longer stand to carry would see it picked up seconds later by someone else.

The United Nations is concerned that the earquake could destroy their peackeeping mission in the country.

"Clearly it is one of the most horrible tragedies for U.N. peacekeeping," said Alain LeRoy, under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations. "The mission had made quite a lot of achievements as far as security and stability. Now we must rebuild and adjust to new demands."

The UN Security Council established the peackeeping mission in 2004 and it has largely eliminated gang control in the country.

"No one can ever doubt again what the relevance of the UN is in the 21st century or the devotion of its employees to the common cause of humanity," former President Bill Clinton, the U.N. special envoy to Haiti, told diplomats in New York. "We owe it to them to respond in the right way."