Port-au-Prince  - As rescue workers continued to dig through the rubble, the number of dead early Sunday had reached 84 in the collapse of a Hatian school as special rescue teams from the US and France rushed to help dig out survivors from the rubble.

An estimated 200 more children and possibly teachers are believed to still be buried in the rubble of the Petion Ville suburb of the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, Radio Metropole reported Saturday.

The school collapsed Friday morning as an estimated 700 students were in the building.

Rescue workers had contact with some of the victims in the rubble and were able to talk to and supply them with water.

Hundreds of despairing parents and family members blocked the access road to the school, which is narrow and had constricted access to the accident site from the beginning.

Rescuers used their bare hands to dig out the rubble.

Another 100 students and teachers were injured when the Evangelical Promise school in the area of Nerette collapsed at around 10 am (1500 GMT) Friday.

The three-storey school educated students from kindergarten to high school.

The number of dead could not yet be officially determined, because many of the children and teachers were still trapped in the ruins, Mayor Clair Lydie Parent said.

The children were in their classrooms at the time of the collapse, Michaele Gedeon, president of Haiti's Red Cross, told CNN. "The whole school collapsed on the kids," she said.

The cause of the collapse was not known.

"We are having difficulty removing students from the rubble because we don't have heavy duty search-and-rescue equipment," said Alex Claudon, also of the Red Cross. He said the number of casualties could be very high.

Gedeon wasn't at the site, but said she could hear rescuers calming down injured students as she coordinated emergency efforts over the phone.

"On the phone you can hear so many children crying ... and saying, 'This one is dead, that one is dead'," Gedeon told CNN. (dpa)