Haiti survivors endure more misery
The staggering scope of Haiti’s nightmare came into sharper focus today as rescuers estimated 200,000 dead and 1.5 million homeless in the quake-ravaged country.
Injured survivors were still dying in the streets, doctors pleading for help and looters fighting each other in the rubble.
The world pledged more money, food, medicine and police. Some 2,000 US Marines steamed into nearby waters. And ex-president Bill Clinton, special UN envoy, flew in to offer support. Six days after the earthquake struck, search teams still pulled buried survivors from the ruins.
But hour by hour the unmet needs of hundreds of thousands grew.
Overwhelmed surgeons appealed for anaesthetics, scalpels, saws for cutting off crushed limbs.
Uncounted thousands of survivors sought to cram onto buses headed out of town. In downtown streets, others begged for basics.
“Have we been abandoned? Where is the food?” shouted one man.
The UN World Food Program (WFP) said it expected to boost operations from feeding 67,000 people on Sunday to 97,000 on Monday. But it needs 100 million prepared meals over the next 30 days, and it appealed for more government donations.
“I know that aid cannot come soon enough,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in New York after returning from Haiti.
“Unplug the bottlenecks,” he urged.
The United Nations will hold an urgent vote today to send 2,000 more troops and 1,500 extra police to protect Haiti’s aid convoys.
The military escorts would ensure desperately-needed food and water was distributed to victims of the humanitarian tragedy without any violence, the world body said.
Mr Ban told the Security Council the UN needed to strengthen its current Haiti force, which has 7,000 military peacekeepers and 2,100 international police, to deal with the increasing demands.
In one step to reassure frustrated aid groups, the US military agreed to give aid deliveries priority over military flights at the now-US-run airport. The Americans’ handling of civilian flights had angered some humanitarian officials.
Looting and violence flared again as hundreds clambered over the broken walls of shops to grab anything they could – including toothpaste, now valuable for lining nostrils against the stench of Port-au-Prince’s dead. Police fired into the air as young men fought each other over rum and beer with broken bottles and machetes.
Hard-pressed medical teams sometimes had to take time away from quake victims to deal with gunshot wounds, said Loris de Filippi of Doctors Without Borders.
In the Montrissant neighbourhood, Red Cross doctors working in shipping containers and saying they “cannot cope” lost 50 patients over two days, said international Red Cross spokesman Simon Schorno.
Amid the debris and the smoke of bodies being burned, dozens of international rescue teams dug on in search of buried survivors.
The latest casualty report, from the European Commission citing Haitian government figures, doubled previous estimates of the dead from the magnitude-7.0 quake, to approximately 200,000, with some 70,000 bodies recovered and trucked off to mass graves.
If accurate, that would make Haiti’s catastrophe about as deadly as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed an estimated 230,000 people in a dozen countries.
European Commission analysts estimate 250,000 were injured and 1.5 million were made homeless. Masses are living under plastic sheets in makeshift camps and in dust-covered automobiles, or had taken to the road seeking out relatives in the safer countryside.
The UN humanitarian chief, Sir John Holmes, said not all 15 planned UN food distribution points were up and running yet. “That’s a question of people, trucks, fuel, but the aid is scaling up very rapidly,” he said.
The priorities are clearing roads, ensuring security at UN distribution points, getting this city’s seaport working again and bringing in more trucks and helicopters.
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