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19 Jan 2010 | “AID CANNOT COME SOON ENOUGH” | |
Haiti needs more of everything
19 JAN 2010: The staggering scope of Haiti's nightmare came into sharper focus Monday as authorities estimated 200,000 dead and 1.5 million homeless in the quake-ravaged heart of this tragic country, where injured survivors still died in the streets, doctors pleaded for help and looters slashed at one another 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, and saws for cutting off crushed limbs.
Uncounted hundreds 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.
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 here, the WFP announced in Rome. The Americans' handling of civilian flights had angered some humanitarian officials.
Looting and violence flared again yesterday, 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.
Amid the debris and the smoke of bodies being burned, dozens of international rescue teams dug on in search of buried survivors. And on Monday afternoon, some 140 hours after the quake, they pulled two Haitian women alive from a collapsed university building. At a destroyed downtown bank, another team believed it was just hours from saving a trapped employee.
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.
The European Union and its individual governments boosted their aid pledges for Haiti to US$606 million in emergency and long-term aid, on top of at least $100 million pledged by the US
For the moment, however, front-line relief workers want simply to get food and water to the hungry and thirsty.
Getting clean water into people's hands is still a dire concern.
``People can survive a few days without food but we must try to avoid major outbreaks of waterborne disease,'' said Brian Feagans, a spokesman for the aid group CARE.
Clinton and his daughter Chelsea pitched in, helping unload cases of bottled water from their plane to a UN truck.
The US based Partners in Health, co-ordinating aid at Port-au-Prince's central hospital, reported ``a desperate need for all the resources required to run a hospital,'' including surgical instruments, anesthesia gear, alcohol, sutures, and saws.
Clinton, visiting the hospital, reported its staff had to use vodka to sterilize equipment. ``It's astonishing what the Haitians have been able to accomplish,'' he said.
More than 1,000 patients awaited surgery at the hospital, Partners in Health said. Right outside the US.-run airport, one man died as Navy helicopters scrambled to evacuate patients to the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, the military reported.
Across the city, thousands of abandoned bodies had been picked up by government crews, but residents dragged still others to crossroads, hoping municipal garbage trucks or aid groups would deal with them.
Looting and violence added to the casualties. The ranks of Haitian police and UN peacekeepers trying to restore order in the stricken city have themselves been decimated in the quake, which destroyed UN headquarters.
The Security Council was expected to approve the reinforcements on Tuesday.
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