Sunday, January 17, 2010

Tens of thousands isolated at quake epicentre

HaitiEarthquake
Residents of Leogane, at the quake's epicentre, have been left to fend for themselves


HaitiEarthquake
A Haitian girl in Leogane, west of Port-au-Prince

HaitiEarthquake
Children are running away from an helicopter delivering aid in Haiti after an earthquake.

HaitiEarthquake
 Haitian citizens have received water in Port-au-Prince from US air crewmen


HaitiEarthquake
Children crowd break down the gate in the UN aid distribution centre near the slum area.





HaitiEarthquake
Survivor are still being rescued by international rescuer.


HaitiEarthquake
President of Haiti and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton meet with relief officers to update coordination of reliefs.




The immense scale of the earthquake devastation outside Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, is becoming clearer.

People in Leogane, at the quake's epicentre, have so far been left to fend for themselves in ad hoc squatter camps.

Great concrete slabs, once roofs or second floors, have concertinaed down crushing people who had no chance of survival.

Almost every concrete structure in the town is flattened, and the town is said to be more devastated than the capital, with dead bodies still littering the streets.

"It's the very epicentre of the earthquake, and many, many thousands are dead," said World Food Program (WFP) spokesman David Orr.

"Nearly every house was destroyed here. The military are talking about 20,000 to 30,000 dead," he said.

People have fled to the surrounding sugar cane fields or into mangrove swamps to get away from the nightmare.

Tens of thousands are living in the open in church compounds, school playgrounds and market places.

Officials say the earthquake has killed at least 50,000 people in total and left 1.5 million homeless, and the United Nations has described the situation as the worst it has ever confronted.

More than 25,000 bodies of victims have been collected and buried, according to Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive.

Attention is turning to survivors as aid arrives - but it is proving difficult to disseminate.

Aircraft trying to drop food and water into Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince are being rushed by desperate and hungry crowds, further disrupting relief efforts.

Two Dominicans have been seriously wounded after being shot as they were handing out aid, and police have fired bullets into the air to try and disperse looters.

United States President Barack Obama says the relief effort cannot be measured in days or weeks, but in months and years.

He has asked former US presidents George W Bush and Bill Clinton to help lead the US fundraising effort for emergency and long-term aid.

In Washington, the two former presidents announced their plans to help Haiti rebuild.

Haiti's survivors say that for many of the injured lying in makeshift hospitals, medical care is too late.

"I've seen so many people pass away in front of my eyes. So many dead people. So right now all we need is help. We need help. We're crying for help," said one survivor.

Moments of joy

But there have been some moments of joy in the earthquake-devastated nation.

US coastguard officers working on rescue efforts in Haiti have delivered a baby boy, as his mother and five other earthquake survivors were medevacked.

The injured were being loaded onto a coastguard plane when a woman complained of pain. Thirty seconds later she had given birth.

As the light was fading and storms were moving in, the pilots knew they could not make it to the nearest hospital, so an aircraft carrier sped to their rescue.

The five injured Haitians plus the new arrival are now being treated in the ship's hospital.

And earlier today a 43-year-old pregnant woman, who spent nearly 70 hours buried under the rubble of a former children's hospital, has been rescued by Brazilian peacekeepers in Port-au-Prince.

The woman was identified as a nurse who worked at the five-story building which collapsed during the earthquake.

Brazilian soldiers and firefighters spent nearly three hours trying to dig out the woman, who was transported to a Brazilian military hospital and was treated for dehydration and other injuries.

The woman's husband who was also in the building, survived.

But four days after the quake struck, hope of finding survivors amid the rubble is dwindling.

"Today is the last day that I think we will be able to find survivors, mainly because of dehydration," said Israeli rescue worker Rami Peltz.

British rescue workers freed two more earthquake victims from the rubble in Port-au-Prince today as disorder grows on the streets of the Haitian capital and aid sits undistributed.

A rescue team from Rapid UK used hammers and chisels as they spent six hours digging a 39-year-old woman out from under the ruins of her collapsed home.

Dan Cooke, a Wiltshire firefighter, said: “There was a woman under three or four floors of concrete squashed in with dead members of her family. That was a hammer and chisel job and it took six hours before the doctor assigned to our team took her to hospital.”

Meanwhile rescuers from Kent Fire and Rescue Service (KFRS) said today that they had reached a man after seven hours of tunnelling. He had been thrown out of his bed by the earthquake and ended up underneath it, which protected him and helped him to survive. After being rehydrated he recovered well and was treated for minor injuries.

Mr Cooke said his team rescued two people yesterday and two the day before. “It is more than we would usually come across," he said. "The people are very tough as a nation and the weather conditions help to keep people alive but as the days go on the chances of people surviving fall massively.”

The 64-strong search and rescue contingent from Britain is among 47 teams working across the capital in dangerous conditions. There have been many scenes of lawlessness as looters ransack shops and stores. In at least one case, angry Haitians have taken the law into their own hands and lynched a suspected looter, dragging his body through the streets with a rope lashed around his feet.

Mr Cooke said: “You hear gunfire, you see gangs of youths carrying machetes but to some extent that is part of the culture here.

“We are doing quite well. The UN security forces are attaching themselves to us and some teams have brought their own armed security.

“The conditions yesterday were very hot and dusty. There is always a smell of the dead and sometimes it is extremely potent. There are some very horrific scenes.”

Britain’s Ambassador to the Dominican Republic and Haiti, Steven Fisher, said that security problems in Port-au-Prince were hampering the relief effort as people awaiting aid grew frustrated.

He told the BBC: “Nobody can go anywhere without security in the city. No aid workers can go anywhere without taking risks with security. That adds to the difficulty of delivering the aid because you not only have to have transport – which is rare – you also have to have some sort of security with you, or you are taking a risk. People are getting angry, people are getting hungry and thirsty.”

The Department for International Development (DfID) said £2 million of the £6 million in aid pledged by the UK Government would be spent on providing logistical support and communications to help speed up the distribution of supplies.




But a “reliable pipeline” is still lacking to get aid through to the people of Haiti, the chief executive of the British Red Cross said today.

Sir Nicholas Young told The Andrew Marr Show on BBC1 that the British people had supported the fundraising campaign “incredibly generously” but that had to be backed up by organisation on the ground in the shattered island.

He said: “The need is to get the aid out from the airport to the people and to get it out in an orderly way that makes sure those most in need get it.

“A measure of law and order on the streets is absolutely vital. These are desperate people in desperate circumstances and the sooner we get a reliable pipeline of aid out to them the better.”

Aftershocks measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale hit Haiti yesterday as rescue teams continued their desperate search for possible survivors trapped in rubble and pulled more bodies out.

Hopes of finding a missing British woman alive were fading after the bodies of her bosses were found among the rubble of the United Nation’s headquarters.

Relatives of Ann Barnes, 59, a UN worker, said that they feared the worst as she has been unaccounted for since the earthquake hit Haiti on Tuesday.

A Foreign Office spokesman said it was in contact with Ms Barnes’s family but had no confirmed reports of British casualties.

The UN said the bodies of its Haiti mission chief, Hedi Annabi, his deputy Luiz Carlos da Costa and Doug Coates, the acting UN police commissioner, were recovered from the collapsed building.

Cash continued to pour into the Haiti Earthquake Appeal, with people across the UK donating £10 million in just 24 hours.

Gordon Brown praised the generosity of British people and added thatr the tragedy was “a summons to action for every continent”.

Charities and aid agencies battled to get emergency supplies to the stricken island and planes that usually carry holidaymakers were pressed into service to carry vital supplies.


Seats were stripped out of economy class to make way for cargo, including containers of water, purification equipment and pumps.

René Préval, the Haitian President, implored the international community to better co-ordinate the massive aid effort for his country and not to squabble over how to provide it.

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, said that there were still no official estimates of the death toll and that unofficial figures of 100,000 may be too low.

Mrs Clinton, who arrived in the devastated capital Port-au-Prince aboard a US Coast Guard plane last night, held talks with US officials organising the relief operation and with Mr Préval.

We are here at the invitation of your government to help you," she told a press conference.

"As President Obama has said, we will be here today, tomorrow and for the time ahead. I know the resilience and strength of the Haitian people. You have been severely tested. But I believe that Haiti can come back stronger and better in the future."

Mr Préval, who said he had just visited a man pulled out of the rubble by American rescuers, said that Mrs Clinton's visit "warmed our hearts". The two countries were to issue a statement later today about how they planned to co-operate.

Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, is also expected to arrive in Haiti today. Mr Ban will assess the Caribbean nation's needs and attempt to boost the shattered morale of the Brazilian-led UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, after the worst disaster in the UN's history.

He said that his one-day visit aimed "to show his solidarity with the people of Haiti and UN staff" and to "assess the humanitarian assistance effort and the scale of the disaster for himself".

With food, water and US troops flowing to Haiti, international donors were struggling to push supplies through a clogged airport to stricken earthquake survivors.

Relief workers warned that unless supplies were delivered quickly, Port-au-Prince would degenerate into lawlessness.

Mr Préval admitted it was “an extremely difficult situation”, but he stressed people must stay calm and not “throw accusations at each other”.

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