* Up to 100 UN staff including believed dead after headquarters collapse
* Charities launch emergency appeals to help stricken survivors
* Presidential palace crumbles, hospital collapses and houses swept away
* Britain sends emergency team as Obama vows 'unwavering' support
Bloodstained bodies are piled high in the streets of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince today amid fears that thousands have died in a catastrophic earthquake.
Rescuers have been forced to dig through rubble with their bare hands to free trapped survivors as the Red Cross said up to three million people may have been affected.
British and international aid agencies are rushing to assist today as the full horror of the disaster began to emerge.
It is still unclear how many have been killed in the earthquake, which measured 7.2 on the Richter scale, but aid agencies fear thousands are dead.
Haitian president Rene Preval described the scene in Port-au Prince as 'unimaginable.'
Parliament has collapsed. The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed,' he said.
Among the fatalities were up to 100 UN staff, including Hedi Annabi, the Secretary General's special envoy, who were working inside its five-storey headquarters when it collapsed.
The Roman Catholic Arcbishop of Port-au-Prince Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot also died. His body was found in the ruins of the archdiocese office.
Around 200 people are also feared dead after a hotel crumbled to dust, the National Palace is in ruins and a major hospital also destroyed.
The destruction is said to be staggering, even in an impoverished nation accustomed to tragedy and disaster.
Eyewitnesses said gravely injured Haitians were crying out from the rubble, pleading for doctors as night fell.
With the country in chaos and facing still more damage from a series of 30 aftershocks, their cries went mostly unheard.
The quake, the most powerful in the region for 200 years, was centred about ten miles west of the Haitian capital, a city of two million people, many of them living in flimsy shanty slums.
It struck at 4.53pm yesterday and was followed by as many as 30 aftershocks, one of them as strong as 5.9 on the Richter scale, a sizeable earthquake in its own right.
The centre was also relatively shallow, less than ten miles below ground, raising the risk of damage.
Survivors held hands and sung hymns as they waited for help to come. But many people spent the night fighting for their lives.
'I can hear very distressed people…a lot of distress, people wailing, trying to find loved ones trapped under the rubble,’ said Ian Rodgers, of Save the Children, who is in Port-au-Prince.
‘I couldn't even stand up, that's how bad it was,’ said Valerie Moliere, 15. ‘There's a lot of people in the street everywhere. Some are wounded.’
‘I just heard that right next to my neighbourhood there's this pharmacy and this school that broke down and many people died,’ she added.
‘Everybody is just totally, totally freaked out and shaken,’ said Henry Bahn, a US Department of Agriculture official visiting Port-au-Prince. ‘The sky is just gray with dust.’
Mr Bahn said there were rocks strewn about and he saw a ravine where several homes had stood: ‘It's just full of collapsed walls and rubble and barbed wire.’
Jocelyn Valcin, a resident of Boynton Beach, Florida who flew in to Miami International Airport from Port-au-Prince on Tuesday evening, said he was at the airport when the earthquake hit.
‘The whole building was cracked down’ said Mr Valcin. ‘The whole outside deteriorated.’
US State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said in Washington that US Embassy personnel were ‘literally in the dark’ after power failed.
‘They reported structures down. They reported a lot of walls down. They did see a number of bodies in the street and on the sidewalk that had been hit by debris. So clearly, there's going to be serious loss of life in this,’ he said.
Aid agencies were today scrambling to co-ordinate a relief effort for the poorest nation in the world.
Gordon Brown confirmed Britain was sending help and said he was 'deeply saddened and worried' by the scale of the earthquake.'
Experts from the Department for International Development (DFID) are already on the way to the stricken region.
Survivors: A boy and a woman wounded and covered in dust are unable to comprehend what has happened
First aid: Residents carry an injured man through the streets of Port-au-Prince
Survivors: A boy and a woman wounded and covered in dust are unable to comprehend what has happened
Dust storm: Damaged buildings in the neighbourhood of Petionville, Port-Au-Prince after the earthquake hit
Shocked: Survivors survey a rubble-strewn street as the full extent of the quake becomes apparent
Desperate: Two women crouch in the rubble hours after the earthquake ripped through Haiti
Shock: Stunned Haitians walk past damaged building in Port-au-Prince in the aftermath of the quake
Emergency aid: Two men help a woman freed from rubble in Haiti
The earthquake epicentre was ten miles outside Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital
Tragedy: The earthquake in Haiti, which has devastated the country, is the latest in a long line of hardships it has had to contend with
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The United Nations deals with humanitarian crises all the time but the devastating earthquake in Haiti has stricken especially close to home, said the head of UN peacekeeping forces Alain Le Roy here Wednesday.
With the number of fatalities among UN staff members rising, LeRoy said the emotion is "extremely high."
The UN has confirmed 10 staff members dead but the figure could end up being "the highest number of fatalities in the United Nations," said Le Roy.
At least 150 UN staff went missing, including the mission chief Hedi Annabi and his deputy special representative Luiz Carlos da Costa, after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake and a series of strong aftershocks hit on Tuesday.
"This is one of the most horrible tragedies for a UN peacekeeping mission," said Le Roy. "We are receiving volunteers from other UN missions, who are offering their services."
Susana Malcorra, head of the Department of Field Support, told reporters that UN staff members are experiencing a "difficult moment."
The UN set up a hotline on Tuesday night to answer questions from family members of UN staff and also established counseling services in Haiti, she said.
"We are focused on making sure we can get people out (of the rubble) and getting them to have the right level of medical treatment ... but the tensions are there," she said.
A large number of buildings in the nation's capital, Port-au-Prince, have been destroyed with layers of floors pan caked on top of one another. The UN mission's headquarters at the Christopher Hotel, a five-story building built in the early 1960s, was also completely leveled and it is believed Annabi and Carlos da Costa are still under the rubble.
The UN has been quickly mobilizing its resources, sending experts and emergency supplies to the Caribbean nation. Communication lines are down and many roads are impassable but the airport remains virtually undamaged.
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