By Widlore Merancourt and Anthony Faiola, Washington Post

PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti — A massive 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti on Saturday morning, leveling dwellings in southwest portions of the country and shaking buildings from the Dominican Republic to Jamaica and Cuba.

Officials and witnesses reported heavy damage and fatalities dozens of miles from the epicenter, 7.4 miles northeast of Saint-Louis du Sud, where the temblor struck at 8:29 a.m.

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Ralph Simon, a radio station owner in Jeremie, a city of 30,000 in the Haitian southwest, said many homes and buildings had been leveled or damaged, including a local church. He said he saw two corpses in the rubble. “The impact of this is huge,” he said. “I was still in bed with my children and my wife. My wife had a heart attack, and I had to save her life. … There are damage to house. People are crying.”

Silvera Guillaume, the civil protection coordinator in the coastal city of Les Cayes, said the community’s resources were being overwhelmed.

“It’s a dire situation, people died. There are people right now under the rubble,” said Guillaume. “We deployed first responders to go and remove rubble, but we do not have enough first responders.”

The reported magnitude from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) was greater than the catastrophic, 7.0 magnitude earthquake that hit 7 miles west of Port-au-Prince in 2010, resulting in more than 220,000 casualties. The USGS noted that the population in the most heavily hit areas largely resides in dwellings vulnerable to earthquake shaking.

Haiti, a country facing a severe humanitarian crisis, entered a new period of political instability in the aftermath of the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July.