Haiti Earthquake

[The Original dpb5!]

Tensions Mount in Devastated Capital as Aid Starts Flooding In.....

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The distance between life and death was narrowing in this flattened city on Friday, with survival after the huge earthquake depending increasingly on the luck of being freed from under rubble, on treating the thousands of wounded, and on speeding the halting flow of emergency food and water.

“Get me out!” came the haunting voice of a teenager, Jhon Verpre Markenley, from a dark crevice of the trade school that collapsed around him and fellow students when the earthquake hit late Tuesday afternoon.

Mr. Verpre’s father risked his own life to save his son’s, going deep into the hole with a blowtorch to try to cut away the metal that was pinning his son’s leg. Hours later, the young man was free. His mother danced.

By Thursday evening, the Haitian president, René Préval, said that 7,000 people had already been buried in a mass grave. Hundreds of corpses piled up outside the city’s morgue, next to a hospital. On street corners, people pulled their shirts up over their faces to filter out the thickening smell of the dead.

Such was the extent of the chaos and destruction that reliable estimates of the numbers of dead and injured were still impossible to make on Friday morning.

With reports of looting and scuffles over water and food, President Obama promised at least $100 million in aid.

“You will not be forsaken, you will not be forgotten,” Mr. Obama told the Haitian people in an emotional address at the White House on Thursday. “In this, your hour of greatest need, America stands with you.”

The first wave of American troops arrived Thursday to begin handling security and cargo operations at Haiti’s main airport, whose principal runway was intact.

“The main thing is to try to establish some order at the airport so we can start getting planes in and out,” said Col. Patrick Hollrah of the U.S. Air Force whose disaster-response team arrived Thursday night from New Jersey aboard a C-17 cargo plane.

In the cockpit of the plane, air traffic chatter could be heard through headsets, giving some sense of the barely controlled confusion in the skies. Planes were being forced to circle for two to three hours before landing.

Also Thursday night, the United States reached an agreement with Cuba to allow American planes on medical-evacuation missions to pass through restricted Cuban airspace, an official said, reducing the flight time to Miami by 90 minutes.

Meanwhile, doctors and search-and-rescue teams worked mostly with the few materials on hand and waited, frustrated, for more supplies, especially much needed heavy equipment.

“Where’s the response?” asked Eduardo A. Fierro, a structural engineer from California who had arrived Thursday to inspect quake-damaged buildings. “You can’t do anything about the dead bodies, but inside many of these buildings people may still be alive. And their time is running out.”

A number of nations pledged financial aid, deployed rescue teams and loaded cargo planes with food and supplies; relief agencies broadcast appeals and assembled their own aid teams; and Web sites were set up to connect people overseas with friends and family in Haiti. But United Nations officials said that Haitians were growing hopeless — and beginning to run out of patience.

“They are slowly getting more angry,” said David Winhurst, the spokesman for the United Nations mission in Haiti, speaking by video link from the Port-au-Prince airport. “We are all aware of the fact that the situation is getting more tense.”

A photographer working for Time magazine, Shaul Schwarz, told Reuters he had come across two roadblocks made from rocks and corpses. Residents had apparently set up the roadblocks in central Port-au-Prince out of frustration over the trickle of assistance.

“They are starting to block the roads with bodies,” Mr. Schwarz said, quoted by Reuters. “It’s getting ugly out there. People are fed up with getting no help.”

The Haitian National Police had virtually disappeared, Mr. Winhurst and another senior United Nations official said, and no longer had a presence on the streets, though witnesses at the city’s already filled main morgue reported seeing police pickup trucks dropping off bodies collected from around the city.

The United Nations officials said that the 3,000 peacekeeping soldiers and police officers around the capital would probably be sufficient to handle any unrest, but that plans were being made to bring in reinforcements from the 6,000 others scattered around the country.

The struggle to survive intensified Thursday, in dramas that played out around this city that has already suffered more than most, from centuries of poverty, violence and natural disaster. Despite the strength of the magnitude 7.0 earthquake, the United Nations reported that the damage, in fact, appeared to be confined to the capital and a few outlying areas, with the rest of the country largely spared.

The capital, however, remained on edge.

“There have been a number of aftershocks and people remain anxious,” said Riccardo Conti, the Haiti director of the International Committee of the Red Cross. “All the houses around us have been vacated and people are literally living out in the open.”

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Reporting was contributed by Damien Cave and Ray Rivera from Port-au-Prince, Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations, Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York, Ginger Thompson, Jeff Zeleny, Elisabeth Bumiller, Helene Cooper and Brian Knowlton from Washington, and Mark McDonald from Hong Kong.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/world/americas/16haiti.html