State Dept says up to 5,500 Americans missing in Haiti

[RamboLiberal]

Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department told NBC News that up to 5,500 Americans could still be trapped in the rubble or missing and unaccounted for after last week's devastating temblor.

The U.S. State Department told NBC News that it was following the cases of 5,500 Americans that are missing and not accounted for.

Determining the number of Americans or dual-citizen nationals in Haiti involves a lot of guesswork — dual citizens do not routinely register with the embassy — but there are clearly thousands whose whereabouts are not know, NBC News reported.

The U.S. Embassy told NBC there were an estimated 45,000 Americans thought to have been in Haiti before the quake. Many of those people are married to Haitians or involved in aid missions and are not looking to leave.

"Information about U.S. citizens who are believed to be trapped in buildings is passed to search-and-rescue teams on the ground in Haiti," said Michele Bond, deputy assistant secretary for Overseas Citizens Services. "So far, we have opened more than 9,000 cases in the crisis database. Of those, just over 3,500 people have been accounted for. The rest are still people that we are working to ascertain the well-being of. As we receive information about anyone, we do contact family members to pass that information back to let them know what we've learned."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34928950/ns/world_news-haiti_earthquake/

[flamingdem]

1. That speaks to an even higher percent of deaths in the whole population

.. not just .3 percent or something ... more like 4% of the entire population, maybe more than 200,000.