Foreign governments and international aid organizations are mobilizing to send assistance to Haiti, after the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in the impoverished island nation devastated much of the capital.

U.N. officials in New York said the number of dead could easily reach into the thousands, with unknown numbers of people believed trapped in collapsed buildings -- including scores who were thought to be buried in the rubble of the hotel that had served as Haiti's U.N. headquarters.

"As we speak, there are still over 100 people unaccounted for under the rubble" of the Christopher Hotel, Alain Le Roy, the U.N.'s top peacekeeping official, told reporters in New York Wednesday morning. "We don't know their fate. Some people have been extracted but only less than 10 for the time being. Some dead, some alive."

The United States, France, China and the Dominican Republic are all sending search and rescue teams to Haiti, the United Nations said, and a U.S. military official said tentative plans are underway for the hospital ship USNS Comfort to dock off the coast to assist the sick and wounded.

The quake, with a preliminary magnitude of 7.0, was centered about 10 miles west of Port-au-Prince, the capital. It destroyed a hospital, the Parliament building, the finance ministry, the presidential palace and the National Cathedral, in addition to the U.N. headquarters countless other buildings.

"These are very sturdy buildings," said Raymond Alcide Joseph, Haiti's ambassador to the United States. "If those buildings are damaged, can you imagine what has happened to all these flimsy abodes" in other parts of the country?

News reports from the capital said survivors were piling bodies of the dead outside as the sun rose Wednesday morning. But with communications networks crippled across the country, there were no firm estimates of the number of fatalities or wounded. The unaccounted for U.N. personnel include Hedi Annabi, a Tunisian who as special envoy to Haiti oversees the 12,000 international and Haitian U.N. employees in the country. U.N. officials said Annabi was meeting with a Chinese delegation in the hotel when the earthquake struck at 4:53 p.m. Tuesday; no one who was in the meeting has been located.

An official Chinese newspaper said Wednesday that eight Chinese U.N. peacekeepers were among the dead and 10 were missing, the AP reported. At least four Brazilian soldiers working on a United Nations peacekeeping mission also were killed, and a large number are missing, Brazilian Gen. Carlos Barcellos told Reuters.

Joseph, the ambassador, said he had spoken with first lady Elisabeth Debrosse Delatour, who said she and President René Préval were unharmed. Many government workers had already left their offices for the day, he added, and therefore survived the collapse of government buildings.

But Joseph said Delatour told him that "most of Port-au-Prince" -- the capital, and a city of two million people -- "is destroyed." He asked for major disaster relief as soon as possible, including sending a U.S. hospital ship to dock off the coast and provide help to those in need. The USNS Comfort provided assistance in Haiti two years ago, when Port-au-Prince was struck by major hurricanes.

President Obama told his national security staff Tuesday night that "he expects an aggressive, coordinated" U.S. response to the tragedy, White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said.

USAID administrator Rajiv Shah said the United States would dispatch two search-and-rescue teams of up to 72 people each. The agency also will send up to 48 tons of rescue equipment. The Coast Guard said Tuesday night that it was preparing to deploy cutters and aircraft to deliver aid as needed.

Associated Press reporters who toured Port-au-Prince described scenes of severe and widespread damage and casualties. They saw women covered in dust clawing out of debris and wailing. Stunned people wandered the streets holding hands, they said, while many gravely injured people sat in the streets, pleading for doctors. Witnesses reported a series of strong aftershocks. Thousands of people gathered in public squares late into the night, singing hymns and weeping.

Joseph said that although the air traffic control tower at the Port-au-Prince airport had been destroyed, the runway was not damaged and "is still usable" for planes carrying aid and rescue crews. An American Airlines flight was able to depart from the airport after the quake hit Tuesday evening, and U.N. officials said they expected to be able to bring in planes of relief workers and supplies on Wednesday.

"People are out in the streets, crying, screaming, shouting," Karel Zelenka, director of the Catholic Relief Services office in Haiti, said Tuesday night. "They see the extent of the damage," he said, but could do little to rescue people trapped under rubble because night had fallen.

"There are a lot of collapsed buildings," Zelenka said in a telephone interview from Port-au-Prince. "This will be a major, major disaster."

He reported that poorly constructed shantytowns and other buildings had crumbled in huge clouds of dust. Near the CRS headquarters, a supermarket was "completely razed," he said, and a gasoline station and a church were reduced to rubble. Among the worst-hit areas was the impoverished Carrefour section of Port-au-Prince near the sea.

In the wealthier Petionville part of the city, where diplomats and well-off Haitians live in hillside homes, a hospital was wrecked and houses had tumbled into a ravine, according to the Associated Press.

In Geneva on Wednesday, a spokesman for the International Federation of the Red Cross estimated that as many as 3 million people across the deeply impoverished country may have been affected by the quake, the Associated Press reported. The Red Cross predicted that it would take 24 to 48 hours for a clear picture to emerge of the scale of the destruction.

Top officials from the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Defense Department and other key agencies met in the situation room at 10 p.m. Tuesday to plan their next steps, White House spokesman Vietor said.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said embassy officials had begun trying to contact Americans living in the city but were hampered by a lack of communication and by roads that were impassable.

"Haiti is one of the poorest countries on Earth, and clearly the most challenged in our hemisphere," Crowley said Tuesday. "We are standing by to provide whatever assistance we can," he said.

The World Bank, which said that its local offices were destroyed but that most staff members were accounted for, plans to send a team to help Haiti assess damage and plan a recovery, Reuters news agency reported.

The international Red Cross said Wednesday that a relief team from Geneva would help Haitian hospitals deal with casualties caused by "massive destruction in all the main neighborhoods of the city," the AP quoted ICRC spokesman Simon Schorno as saying. Schorno said Haitian Red Cross staff were overwhelmed and there was little or no coordinated aid effort at this point. Finding and rescuing survivors will be a priority, he said.

In Port-au-Prince, Zelenka, the relief agency director, said that the walls of the Catholic Relief Services headquarters had collapsed but that the building was "only twisted" and that employees were able to get out safely. He said he hoped a contingent of more than 8,000 U.N. troops stationed in the country would be able to help by daybreak.

"Haiti is not used to earthquakes," he said. "There is no earth-moving equipment available."

Kristie van de Wetering, a former Oxfam employee still based in Port-au-Prince, described the situation as "very chaotic, with houses in rubble everywhere."

"There is a blanket of dust rising from the valley south of the capital," van de Wetering said. "We can hear people calling for help from every corner. The aftershocks are ongoing and making people very nervous."

The quake hit about the time that children would be coming home from school, and it was not immediately known whether students had made it home by then or how their houses had fared in the long and powerful temblor.

In an interview with CNN from Port-au-Prince, eyewitness Michael Bazile described panic in a severely damaged city.

"Everybody is on the street. The traffic is jammed," he said. "Everybody is yelling. They are praying. They are crying. Many houses are down. We really don't know what's going on. And every 30 minutes, we feel it again. We pray it's over, but we don't know."

Heidi Lenzini, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Southern Command, said the military was just beginning to assess what resources it has in the region and to coordinate with the State Department on how to get the help to Haiti.

Lenzini said no official request for help had reached the U.S. military.

Conor Shapiro, a hospital administrator living in Haiti, told relatives in an e-mail that he was in Fond-des-Blancs, a small town about 90 miles west of Port-au-Prince, when the quake struck. He reported "a lot of shaking" in the town but minimal structural damage.

Staff writers Colum Lynch in New York contributed to this report.

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