We're dancing as fast as we can....
Jan. 14th, 2010 08:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avanta7Anger grows in quake-hit Haiti over aid delay
Ummm. Folks? Your country's entire infrastructure collapsed in that quake. And you're on an island. Your neighbor, the Dominican Republic, was Johnny-on-the-spot with assistance and the rest of the world is doing its level best to get relief workers, food, water, and other necessities to you as quickly as we can.
But....
The Port-au-Prince airport runways are too short to handle the biggest cargo planes we have, so we're using the smaller ones. The control tower is non-functional so pilots have to coordinate takeoffs and landings with each other by sight and by radio. It's a miracle no planes have crashed. There isn't enough jet fuel for return flights and space to park the empty planes is filling up. The cranes that usually offload cargo ships were knocked into the harbor, making large shipments by sea impossible. The roads are in sorry shape, so delivery of what aid can get through is hampered.
We understand your situation is desperate, and we're getting stuff to you just as fast as humanly possible. But seriously, how is stacking corpses in the street as roadblocks going to help?
Anger grows in quake-hit Haiti over aid delay
PORT-AU-PRINCE — Desperate Haitians set up roadblocks with corpses in Port-au-Prince on Thursday to demand quicker relief efforts after a massive earthquake killed tens of thousands and left countless others homeless.
Angry survivors staged the protest as international aid began arriving in the Haitian capital to help a nation traumatized by Tuesday's catastrophic earthquake that flattened homes and government buildings.
More than 48 hours after the disaster, tens of thousands of people clamored for food and water and help digging out relatives still missing under the rubble.
Shaul Schwarz, a photographer for TIME magazine, said he saw at least two downtown roadblocks formed with bodies of earthquake victims and rocks.
"They are starting to block the roads with bodies. It's getting ugly out there. People are fed up with getting no help," he told Reuters.
The Haitian Red Cross said it believed 45,000 to 50,000 people had died and 3 million more -- one third of Haiti's population -- were hurt or left homeless by the major 7.0 magnitude quake that hit its impoverished capital on Tuesday.
The quake flattened buildings across entire hillsides and many people were still trapped alive in the rubble after two days, with little sign of organized rescue efforts.
"We have already buried 7,000 in a mass grave," President Rene Preval said.
Planes full of supplies arrived at Port-au-Prince airport faster than crews could unload them and aviation authorities were restricting non-emergency flights.
The influx of aid had yet to reach shell-shocked Haitians who wandered the broken streets of Port-au-Prince, searching desperately for water, food and medical help.
Relief workers warned the death toll will rise quickly if tens of thousands of injured Haitians, many with broken bones and serious loss of blood, do not get first aid in the next day or so.
"The next 24 hours will be critical," said U.S. Coast Guard officer Paul Cormier, 54, a qualified emergency worker who runs an orphanage in Haiti and has triaged 300 people since Tuesday's disaster.
OBAMA: "WORLD STANDS WITH YOU"
Looters swarmed a collapsed supermarket in the Delmas area of Port-au-Prince, carrying out electronics and bags of rice unchallenged. Others siphoned gasoline from a wrecked tanker.
"All the policemen are busy rescuing and burying their own families," said tile factory owner Manuel Deheusch. "They don't have the time to patrol the streets."
Doctors in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, were ill-equipped to treat the injured.
The United States was sending 3,500 soldiers, 300 medical personnel, several ships and 2,200 Marines. Canadian military ships with 500 personnel were on the way and a disaster aid team had already arrived.
"To the people of Haiti, we say clearly and with conviction, you will not be forsaken. ... America stands with you. The world stands with you," President Barack Obama said.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Haiti had suffered a tragedy beyond imagination and "must become the center of our world's attention, the world's compassion and the world's humanitarian help."
The United States pledged long-term help for the crippled Haitian government. Parliament, the national palace and many government ministry buildings collapsed and it was unclear how many lawmakers survived. The main prison also fell, allowing dangerous criminals to escape.
Makeshift tents were strung everywhere and Haitians at one informal camp approached a journalist shouting "water, water" in a multitude of languages.
"Please do anything you can, these people have no water, no food, no medicine, nobody is helping us," said Valery Louis, who organized one of the camps.
From time to time, aftershocks still shook the wrecked city, sending panicked people running away from buildings.
The quake's epicenter was only 10 miles from Port-au-Prince, a sprawling and densely packed city of 4 million people in a nation dogged by poverty, catastrophic natural disasters and political instability.
PILED BODIES
Bodies lay all around the hilly city, and people covered their noses with cloth to try to block the stench. Corpses were delivered by the pickup truck load to the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince, where hospital director Guy LaRoche estimated the bodies piled outside the morgue numbered 1,500.
The Haitian Red Cross had run out of body bags and the International Committee of the Red Cross was sending more.
Haitians clawed at chunks of concrete with bare hands and sledgehammers, trying to free those buried alive.
A 35-year-old Estonian, Tarmo Joveer, was freed from the rubble of the United Nations' five-story headquarters early Thursday, and told journalists he was fine.
The U.N. said at least 36 members of its 9,000-strong peacekeeping mission had been killed and scores were still missing. Brazil said 14 of its soldiers were among the dead.
Fourteen guests and workers were pulled alive on Thursday from the landmark Montana Hotel, which was largely flattened. Chilean Army Major Rodrigo Vazquez, who was directing the rescue at that site, said "We estimate 70 more inside. ... This is devastating."
Nations around the world pitched in to send rescue teams with search dogs and heavy equipment, helicopters, tents, water purification units, food, doctors and telecoms teams.
Aid distribution was hampered because roads were blocked by rubble and smashed cars and normal communications were cut off. Relief agencies' offices were damaged and their staff dead or missing. The port was too badly damaged to handle cargo.
U.N. peacekeepers seemed overwhelmed by the enormity of the recovery task ahead.
Many hospitals were too battered to use, and doctors struggled to treat crushed limbs, head wounds and broken bones at makeshift facilities where medical supplies were scarce.
Several nations sent mobile hospitals, surgeons and even psychologists to help traumatized Haitians.
For relief effort coverage, go to http://www.alertnet.org/ and for a Haiti timeline see http://link.reuters.com/deb63h.
(Additional reporting by Raymond Colitt, Carlos Barria, David Morgan, Joseph Guyler Delva, Stephanie Nebehay, Patrick Worsnip and Louis Charbonneau; Writing by Jane Sutton, Pascal Fletcher and Anthony Boadle; editing by Todd Eastham)
© 2010 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved.
~~~
Haiti quake aid snarled; up to 50,000 feared dead
(01-14) 18:15 PST PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) --
Doctors and search dogs, troops and rescue teams flew to this devastated land of dazed, dead and dying people Thursday, finding bottlenecks everywhere, beginning at a main airport short on jet fuel and ramp space and without a control tower.
The international Red Cross estimated 45,000 to 50,000 people were killed in Tuesday's cataclysmic earthquake, based on information from the Haitian Red Cross and government officials. Hard-pressed recovery teams resorted to using bulldozers to transport loads of dead.
Worries mounted, meanwhile, about food and water for the survivors. "People have been almost fighting for water," aid worker Fevil Dubien said as he distributed water from a truck in a northern Port-au-Prince neighborhood.
From Virginia, from France, from China, a handful of rescue teams were able to get down to work, scouring the rubble for survivors. In one "small miracle," searchers pulled a security guard alive from beneath the collapsed concrete floors of the U.N. peacekeeping headquarters, where many others were entombed.
But the silence of the dead otherwise was overwhelming in a city where uncounted bodies littered the streets in the 80-degree heat, and dust-caked arms and legs reached, frozen and lifeless, from the ruins. Outside the General Hospital morgue, hundreds of collected corpses blanketed the parking lot, as the grief-stricken searched among them for loved ones. Brazilian U.N. peacekeepers, key to city security, were trying to organize mass burials.
Patience already was wearing thin among the poorest who were waiting for aid, said David Wimhurst, spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping mission.
"They want us to provide them with help, which is, of course, what we want to do," he said. But they see U.N. vehicles patrolling the streets to maintain calm, and not delivering aid, and "they're slowly getting more angry and impatient," he said.
In Washington, President Barack Obama announced "one of the largest relief efforts in our recent history," starting with $100 million in aid. The U.S. Southern Command reported the first 100 of a planned 900 paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division landed in Haiti from North Carolina on Thursday to support disaster relief, to be followed this weekend by more than 2,000 Marines. The American troops "will relieve pressure" on overworked U.N. elements, Wimhurst said.
From Europe, Asia and the Americas, other governments, the U.N. and private aid groups were sending planeloads of high-energy biscuits and other food, tons of water, tents, blankets, water-purification gear, heavy equipment for removing debris, helicopters and other transport, and teams of hundreds of search-and-rescue, medical and other specialists.
But two days after much of this ramshackle city was shattered, the global helping hand was slowed by the poor roads, airport and seaport of a wretchedly poor nation.
Some 60 aid flights had arrived by midday Thursday, but they then had to contend with the chokepoint of an overloaded Toussaint L'Ouverture International Airport. At midday, the Federal Aviation Administration said it was temporarily halting all civilian flights from the U.S. at Haiti's request, because the airport was jammed and jet fuel was limited for return flights. The control tower had been destroyed in Tuesday's tremor, complicating air traffic. Civilian relief flights were later allowed to resume.
"There's only so much concrete" for parking planes, U.S. Air Force Col. Buck Elton said at the airport. "It's a constant puzzle of trying to move aircraft in and out."
Teams that did land then had to navigate Haiti's inadequate roads, sometimes blocked by debris or by quake survivors looking for safe open areas as aftershocks still rumbled through the city. The U.N. World Food Program said the quake-damaged seaport made ship deliveries of aid impossible.
The looting of shops that broke out after the 7.0-magnitude quake struck late Tuesday afternoon added to concerns. The Brazilian military warned aid convoys to add security to guard against looting by the desperate population.
"There is no other way to get provisions," American Red Cross representative Matt Marek said of the store looting. "Even if you have money, those resources are going to be exhausted in a few days." The city's "ti-marchant," mostly women who sell food on the streets, were expected to run out soon. Red Cross officials have estimated one-third of Haiti's 9 million people are in need of aid.
The quake brought down Port-au-Prince's gleaming white National Palace and other government buildings, disabling much of the national leadership. That vacuum was evident Thursday. No senior Haitian government officials were visible at the airport, although President Leonel Fernandez of the neighboring Dominican Republic said after meeting with President Rene Preval that the Haitian leader was in control of the situation, working from the airport.
"Donations are coming in to the airport here, but there is not yet a system to get it in," said Kate Conradt, a spokeswoman for the Save the Children aid group. "It's necessary to create a structure to stock and distribute supplies," the Brazilian military said.
Edmond Mulet, a former U.N. peacekeeping chief in Haiti, arrived Thursday from U.N. headquarters in New York to lead the relief effort, along with a U.N. disaster coordination team. The first U.S. military units to arrive took on a coordinating role at the airport, but State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley underlined, "We're not taking over Haiti."
Wimhurst said the Haitian police "are not visible at all," no doubt because many had to deal with lost homes and family members, and law-and-order needs had fallen completely to the 9,000 U.N. peacekeepers and international police in Haiti.
Across the sprawling, hilly city, people milled about in open areas, hopeful for help, sometimes setting up camps amid piles of salvaged goods, including food scavenged from the rubble. Small groups by roadsides could be seen burying dead. Other dust-covered bodies were being dragged down streets, toward hospitals where relatives hoped to leave them. Countless remained unburied, stacked up, children's bodies lying atop mothers, tiny feet poking from blankets.
The injured, meanwhile, waited for treatment in makeshift holding areas — outside the General Hospital, for example, where the stench from piles of dead, just a few yards (meters) away, wafted over the assembled living. Crews began removing unclaimed bodies with bulldozers, dumping them into trucks, possibly for mass burial.
Heavy damage to at least eight Port-au-Prince hospitals severely hampered efforts to treat the many thousands of injured, the World Health Organization said in Geneva. At least 2,000 injured were reported to have been treated at hospitals next door in the Dominican Republic, including the president of the Haitian Senate, Kelly Bestien.
Here and there, small tragedies unfolded. In the Petionville suburb, friends held back Kettely Clerge — "I want to see her," she sobbed — as neighbors with bare hands tried to dig out her 9-year-old goddaughter, Harryssa Keem Clerge, pleading for rescue, from beneath their home's rubble.
"There's no police, there's nobody," the hopeless godmother cried. By day's end, the girl was dead.
At the collapsed U.N. peacekeeping headquarters, search-and-rescue firefighters from Fairfax County, Va., pulled an Estonian guard, Tarmo Joveer, alive and unhurt from the ruins at 8 a.m. Thursday, 39 hours after the quake — a "small miracle," Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in New York. But U.N. officials reported that 36 other U.N. personnel, mostly peacekeepers and international police, were confirmed dead and almost 200 remained missing, including top staff.
Nearby, a rescue team from China, with sniffer dogs, clambered through rubble and searched for signs of life. Two excavators stood by, ready to dig for survivors — or dead. A French team, meanwhile, rescued three people alive from the wrecked Montana Hotel, U.N. officials reported.
European and Latin American nations reported scores of their nationals unaccounted- for in Haiti, and a handful confirmed dead. Of the estimated 45,000 Americans in Haiti, the U.S. Embassy had contacted almost 1,000. Only one American was confirmed dead, a veteran Foreign Service officer, Victoria DeLong, killed in her collapsed home.
For the long-suffering people of Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation, shock and disbelief were giving way to despair.
"We need food. The people are suffering. My neighbors and friends are suffering," said Sylvain Angerlotte, 22. "We don't have money. We don't have nothing to eat. We need pure water."
But life also went on. Brazilian soldiers helped deliver a baby girl in an improvised garage-hospital at their base, just hours after the quake hit. Capt. Fabricio Almeida de Moura said the child was doing well, but the life of the mother, who apparently went into labor from the shock of the tremor, was in danger from bleeding, the Agencia Brasil news service reported.
The unimaginable scope of the catastrophe left many Haitians, a fervently religious people, in helpless tears and prayer.
Reached by The Associated Press from New York, Yael Talleyrand, a 16-year-old student in Jacmel, on Haiti's south coast, told of thousands of people made homeless by the quake and sleeping on an airfield runway, "crying, praying and I had never seen this in my entire life."
Earlier, she said, one woman had run through Jacmel's streets screaming, "God, we know you can kill us! We know you're strongest! You don't need to show us!"
___
Associated Press contributors to this story: Mike Melia, Jennifer Kay and Gregory Bull in Port-au-Prince; Alexander G. Higgins in Geneva; Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations; Tales Azzoni in Sao Paulo, Brazil; David McFadden in San Juan, Puerto Rico; Adam Geller in New York; Matthew Lee and Pauline Jelinek in Washington.
Ummm. Folks? Your country's entire infrastructure collapsed in that quake. And you're on an island. Your neighbor, the Dominican Republic, was Johnny-on-the-spot with assistance and the rest of the world is doing its level best to get relief workers, food, water, and other necessities to you as quickly as we can.
But....
The Port-au-Prince airport runways are too short to handle the biggest cargo planes we have, so we're using the smaller ones. The control tower is non-functional so pilots have to coordinate takeoffs and landings with each other by sight and by radio. It's a miracle no planes have crashed. There isn't enough jet fuel for return flights and space to park the empty planes is filling up. The cranes that usually offload cargo ships were knocked into the harbor, making large shipments by sea impossible. The roads are in sorry shape, so delivery of what aid can get through is hampered.
We understand your situation is desperate, and we're getting stuff to you just as fast as humanly possible. But seriously, how is stacking corpses in the street as roadblocks going to help?
Anger grows in quake-hit Haiti over aid delay
PORT-AU-PRINCE — Desperate Haitians set up roadblocks with corpses in Port-au-Prince on Thursday to demand quicker relief efforts after a massive earthquake killed tens of thousands and left countless others homeless.
Angry survivors staged the protest as international aid began arriving in the Haitian capital to help a nation traumatized by Tuesday's catastrophic earthquake that flattened homes and government buildings.
More than 48 hours after the disaster, tens of thousands of people clamored for food and water and help digging out relatives still missing under the rubble.
Shaul Schwarz, a photographer for TIME magazine, said he saw at least two downtown roadblocks formed with bodies of earthquake victims and rocks.
"They are starting to block the roads with bodies. It's getting ugly out there. People are fed up with getting no help," he told Reuters.
The Haitian Red Cross said it believed 45,000 to 50,000 people had died and 3 million more -- one third of Haiti's population -- were hurt or left homeless by the major 7.0 magnitude quake that hit its impoverished capital on Tuesday.
The quake flattened buildings across entire hillsides and many people were still trapped alive in the rubble after two days, with little sign of organized rescue efforts.
"We have already buried 7,000 in a mass grave," President Rene Preval said.
Planes full of supplies arrived at Port-au-Prince airport faster than crews could unload them and aviation authorities were restricting non-emergency flights.
The influx of aid had yet to reach shell-shocked Haitians who wandered the broken streets of Port-au-Prince, searching desperately for water, food and medical help.
Relief workers warned the death toll will rise quickly if tens of thousands of injured Haitians, many with broken bones and serious loss of blood, do not get first aid in the next day or so.
"The next 24 hours will be critical," said U.S. Coast Guard officer Paul Cormier, 54, a qualified emergency worker who runs an orphanage in Haiti and has triaged 300 people since Tuesday's disaster.
OBAMA: "WORLD STANDS WITH YOU"
Looters swarmed a collapsed supermarket in the Delmas area of Port-au-Prince, carrying out electronics and bags of rice unchallenged. Others siphoned gasoline from a wrecked tanker.
"All the policemen are busy rescuing and burying their own families," said tile factory owner Manuel Deheusch. "They don't have the time to patrol the streets."
Doctors in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, were ill-equipped to treat the injured.
The United States was sending 3,500 soldiers, 300 medical personnel, several ships and 2,200 Marines. Canadian military ships with 500 personnel were on the way and a disaster aid team had already arrived.
"To the people of Haiti, we say clearly and with conviction, you will not be forsaken. ... America stands with you. The world stands with you," President Barack Obama said.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Haiti had suffered a tragedy beyond imagination and "must become the center of our world's attention, the world's compassion and the world's humanitarian help."
The United States pledged long-term help for the crippled Haitian government. Parliament, the national palace and many government ministry buildings collapsed and it was unclear how many lawmakers survived. The main prison also fell, allowing dangerous criminals to escape.
Makeshift tents were strung everywhere and Haitians at one informal camp approached a journalist shouting "water, water" in a multitude of languages.
"Please do anything you can, these people have no water, no food, no medicine, nobody is helping us," said Valery Louis, who organized one of the camps.
From time to time, aftershocks still shook the wrecked city, sending panicked people running away from buildings.
The quake's epicenter was only 10 miles from Port-au-Prince, a sprawling and densely packed city of 4 million people in a nation dogged by poverty, catastrophic natural disasters and political instability.
PILED BODIES
Bodies lay all around the hilly city, and people covered their noses with cloth to try to block the stench. Corpses were delivered by the pickup truck load to the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince, where hospital director Guy LaRoche estimated the bodies piled outside the morgue numbered 1,500.
The Haitian Red Cross had run out of body bags and the International Committee of the Red Cross was sending more.
Haitians clawed at chunks of concrete with bare hands and sledgehammers, trying to free those buried alive.
A 35-year-old Estonian, Tarmo Joveer, was freed from the rubble of the United Nations' five-story headquarters early Thursday, and told journalists he was fine.
The U.N. said at least 36 members of its 9,000-strong peacekeeping mission had been killed and scores were still missing. Brazil said 14 of its soldiers were among the dead.
Fourteen guests and workers were pulled alive on Thursday from the landmark Montana Hotel, which was largely flattened. Chilean Army Major Rodrigo Vazquez, who was directing the rescue at that site, said "We estimate 70 more inside. ... This is devastating."
Nations around the world pitched in to send rescue teams with search dogs and heavy equipment, helicopters, tents, water purification units, food, doctors and telecoms teams.
Aid distribution was hampered because roads were blocked by rubble and smashed cars and normal communications were cut off. Relief agencies' offices were damaged and their staff dead or missing. The port was too badly damaged to handle cargo.
U.N. peacekeepers seemed overwhelmed by the enormity of the recovery task ahead.
Many hospitals were too battered to use, and doctors struggled to treat crushed limbs, head wounds and broken bones at makeshift facilities where medical supplies were scarce.
Several nations sent mobile hospitals, surgeons and even psychologists to help traumatized Haitians.
For relief effort coverage, go to http://www.alertnet.org/ and for a Haiti timeline see http://link.reuters.com/deb63h.
(Additional reporting by Raymond Colitt, Carlos Barria, David Morgan, Joseph Guyler Delva, Stephanie Nebehay, Patrick Worsnip and Louis Charbonneau; Writing by Jane Sutton, Pascal Fletcher and Anthony Boadle; editing by Todd Eastham)
© 2010 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved.
~~~
Haiti quake aid snarled; up to 50,000 feared dead
(01-14) 18:15 PST PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) --
Doctors and search dogs, troops and rescue teams flew to this devastated land of dazed, dead and dying people Thursday, finding bottlenecks everywhere, beginning at a main airport short on jet fuel and ramp space and without a control tower.
The international Red Cross estimated 45,000 to 50,000 people were killed in Tuesday's cataclysmic earthquake, based on information from the Haitian Red Cross and government officials. Hard-pressed recovery teams resorted to using bulldozers to transport loads of dead.
Worries mounted, meanwhile, about food and water for the survivors. "People have been almost fighting for water," aid worker Fevil Dubien said as he distributed water from a truck in a northern Port-au-Prince neighborhood.
From Virginia, from France, from China, a handful of rescue teams were able to get down to work, scouring the rubble for survivors. In one "small miracle," searchers pulled a security guard alive from beneath the collapsed concrete floors of the U.N. peacekeeping headquarters, where many others were entombed.
But the silence of the dead otherwise was overwhelming in a city where uncounted bodies littered the streets in the 80-degree heat, and dust-caked arms and legs reached, frozen and lifeless, from the ruins. Outside the General Hospital morgue, hundreds of collected corpses blanketed the parking lot, as the grief-stricken searched among them for loved ones. Brazilian U.N. peacekeepers, key to city security, were trying to organize mass burials.
Patience already was wearing thin among the poorest who were waiting for aid, said David Wimhurst, spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping mission.
"They want us to provide them with help, which is, of course, what we want to do," he said. But they see U.N. vehicles patrolling the streets to maintain calm, and not delivering aid, and "they're slowly getting more angry and impatient," he said.
In Washington, President Barack Obama announced "one of the largest relief efforts in our recent history," starting with $100 million in aid. The U.S. Southern Command reported the first 100 of a planned 900 paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division landed in Haiti from North Carolina on Thursday to support disaster relief, to be followed this weekend by more than 2,000 Marines. The American troops "will relieve pressure" on overworked U.N. elements, Wimhurst said.
From Europe, Asia and the Americas, other governments, the U.N. and private aid groups were sending planeloads of high-energy biscuits and other food, tons of water, tents, blankets, water-purification gear, heavy equipment for removing debris, helicopters and other transport, and teams of hundreds of search-and-rescue, medical and other specialists.
But two days after much of this ramshackle city was shattered, the global helping hand was slowed by the poor roads, airport and seaport of a wretchedly poor nation.
Some 60 aid flights had arrived by midday Thursday, but they then had to contend with the chokepoint of an overloaded Toussaint L'Ouverture International Airport. At midday, the Federal Aviation Administration said it was temporarily halting all civilian flights from the U.S. at Haiti's request, because the airport was jammed and jet fuel was limited for return flights. The control tower had been destroyed in Tuesday's tremor, complicating air traffic. Civilian relief flights were later allowed to resume.
"There's only so much concrete" for parking planes, U.S. Air Force Col. Buck Elton said at the airport. "It's a constant puzzle of trying to move aircraft in and out."
Teams that did land then had to navigate Haiti's inadequate roads, sometimes blocked by debris or by quake survivors looking for safe open areas as aftershocks still rumbled through the city. The U.N. World Food Program said the quake-damaged seaport made ship deliveries of aid impossible.
The looting of shops that broke out after the 7.0-magnitude quake struck late Tuesday afternoon added to concerns. The Brazilian military warned aid convoys to add security to guard against looting by the desperate population.
"There is no other way to get provisions," American Red Cross representative Matt Marek said of the store looting. "Even if you have money, those resources are going to be exhausted in a few days." The city's "ti-marchant," mostly women who sell food on the streets, were expected to run out soon. Red Cross officials have estimated one-third of Haiti's 9 million people are in need of aid.
The quake brought down Port-au-Prince's gleaming white National Palace and other government buildings, disabling much of the national leadership. That vacuum was evident Thursday. No senior Haitian government officials were visible at the airport, although President Leonel Fernandez of the neighboring Dominican Republic said after meeting with President Rene Preval that the Haitian leader was in control of the situation, working from the airport.
"Donations are coming in to the airport here, but there is not yet a system to get it in," said Kate Conradt, a spokeswoman for the Save the Children aid group. "It's necessary to create a structure to stock and distribute supplies," the Brazilian military said.
Edmond Mulet, a former U.N. peacekeeping chief in Haiti, arrived Thursday from U.N. headquarters in New York to lead the relief effort, along with a U.N. disaster coordination team. The first U.S. military units to arrive took on a coordinating role at the airport, but State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley underlined, "We're not taking over Haiti."
Wimhurst said the Haitian police "are not visible at all," no doubt because many had to deal with lost homes and family members, and law-and-order needs had fallen completely to the 9,000 U.N. peacekeepers and international police in Haiti.
Across the sprawling, hilly city, people milled about in open areas, hopeful for help, sometimes setting up camps amid piles of salvaged goods, including food scavenged from the rubble. Small groups by roadsides could be seen burying dead. Other dust-covered bodies were being dragged down streets, toward hospitals where relatives hoped to leave them. Countless remained unburied, stacked up, children's bodies lying atop mothers, tiny feet poking from blankets.
The injured, meanwhile, waited for treatment in makeshift holding areas — outside the General Hospital, for example, where the stench from piles of dead, just a few yards (meters) away, wafted over the assembled living. Crews began removing unclaimed bodies with bulldozers, dumping them into trucks, possibly for mass burial.
Heavy damage to at least eight Port-au-Prince hospitals severely hampered efforts to treat the many thousands of injured, the World Health Organization said in Geneva. At least 2,000 injured were reported to have been treated at hospitals next door in the Dominican Republic, including the president of the Haitian Senate, Kelly Bestien.
Here and there, small tragedies unfolded. In the Petionville suburb, friends held back Kettely Clerge — "I want to see her," she sobbed — as neighbors with bare hands tried to dig out her 9-year-old goddaughter, Harryssa Keem Clerge, pleading for rescue, from beneath their home's rubble.
"There's no police, there's nobody," the hopeless godmother cried. By day's end, the girl was dead.
At the collapsed U.N. peacekeeping headquarters, search-and-rescue firefighters from Fairfax County, Va., pulled an Estonian guard, Tarmo Joveer, alive and unhurt from the ruins at 8 a.m. Thursday, 39 hours after the quake — a "small miracle," Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in New York. But U.N. officials reported that 36 other U.N. personnel, mostly peacekeepers and international police, were confirmed dead and almost 200 remained missing, including top staff.
Nearby, a rescue team from China, with sniffer dogs, clambered through rubble and searched for signs of life. Two excavators stood by, ready to dig for survivors — or dead. A French team, meanwhile, rescued three people alive from the wrecked Montana Hotel, U.N. officials reported.
European and Latin American nations reported scores of their nationals unaccounted- for in Haiti, and a handful confirmed dead. Of the estimated 45,000 Americans in Haiti, the U.S. Embassy had contacted almost 1,000. Only one American was confirmed dead, a veteran Foreign Service officer, Victoria DeLong, killed in her collapsed home.
For the long-suffering people of Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation, shock and disbelief were giving way to despair.
"We need food. The people are suffering. My neighbors and friends are suffering," said Sylvain Angerlotte, 22. "We don't have money. We don't have nothing to eat. We need pure water."
But life also went on. Brazilian soldiers helped deliver a baby girl in an improvised garage-hospital at their base, just hours after the quake hit. Capt. Fabricio Almeida de Moura said the child was doing well, but the life of the mother, who apparently went into labor from the shock of the tremor, was in danger from bleeding, the Agencia Brasil news service reported.
The unimaginable scope of the catastrophe left many Haitians, a fervently religious people, in helpless tears and prayer.
Reached by The Associated Press from New York, Yael Talleyrand, a 16-year-old student in Jacmel, on Haiti's south coast, told of thousands of people made homeless by the quake and sleeping on an airfield runway, "crying, praying and I had never seen this in my entire life."
Earlier, she said, one woman had run through Jacmel's streets screaming, "God, we know you can kill us! We know you're strongest! You don't need to show us!"
___
Associated Press contributors to this story: Mike Melia, Jennifer Kay and Gregory Bull in Port-au-Prince; Alexander G. Higgins in Geneva; Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations; Tales Azzoni in Sao Paulo, Brazil; David McFadden in San Juan, Puerto Rico; Adam Geller in New York; Matthew Lee and Pauline Jelinek in Washington.
