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. þþ“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. þþMr. 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.þþBy 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. þþSuch 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. þþWith reports of looting and scuffles over water and food, President Obama promised at least $100 million in aid. þþ“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.”þþThe first wave of American troops arrived Thursday to begin handling security and cargo operations at Haiti’s main airport, whose principal runway was intact. þþ“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. þþIn 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. þþAlso 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.þþMeanwhile, 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. þþ“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.”þþA 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.þþ“They are slowly getting more angry,” said David Wimhurst, 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.” þþA 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.þþ“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.”þþThe Haitian National Police had virtually disappeared, Mr. Wimhurst 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.þþThe 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. þþThe 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. þþThe capital, however, remained on edge.þþ“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.”þþRonald Jedna, covered in white dust atop a damaged building, had just been freed, after spending a day caught in a crevice of his apartment building with heavy beams pressing in tight against his chest. þþHe said he tried to cry out but his throat was too dry and he was too weak. Only a whisper would come out. Eventually, though, a neighbor peered through a tiny slit, discovered him and managed to pry him loose.þþ“A day felt like a year,” he said. “You’re buried alive. You can’t scream. You wonder if anyone will ever come.” þþMr. Jedna had a deep, untreated wound in his shin. He stood atop the rubble looking for others who might still be breathing.þþThe United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, described another “small miracle during a night which brought few other miracles.” An Estonian bodyguard named Tarmo Joveer was recovered, virtually unscathed, from beneath 13 feet of debris at the United Nations offices at the Christopher Hotel on Thursday morning, where 100 more of the organization’s workers remained buried inside. Rescuers found him with the help of electronic sensors and dogs brought in by the American, Chinese and French teams, and had helped keep him alive by piping him water through a tube.þþBut hope was fading for perhaps tens of thousands of others. þþResidents interviewed through the city said that the cries that they heard emanating from many collapsed buildings in the initial hours after the quake had begun to soften, if not quiet completely.þþ“There’s no more life here,” said a grandmother, who nonetheless rapped a broom against concrete in hopes that her four missing relatives believed to be buried inside might somehow respond.þþPascale Valérie Lisnay, whose brother was buried in the collapsed trade school, said she longed to hear anything from him, a moan, a cry, anything to give her hope that he was still alive. Standing outside one of countless similarly horrible sites across Port-au-Prince, she dialed her brother’s cellphone number again and again, tears filling her eyes each time it failed to connect.þþ“He’s gone,” she said.þþThe United Nations said it had confirmed that 36 of its workers had been killed in the earthquake, 73 had been injured, and an additional 160 were still missing. The United Nations began an effort to send teams around to the homes of its more than 1,200 local staff members to see if they were still alive and what help they needed, the two officials said. þþAt the ruins of the Montana Hotel, where many United Nations workers stayed, a French rescue team had extracted three people alive and one corpse, said Mr. Wimhurst, the United Nations spokesman. Once the machines come in to lift large blocks of concrete both there and around the city, the toll is expected to mount sharply. þþMr. Wimhurst himself was inside the Christopher Hotel at the time the earthquake struck. þþ“It accelerated with extreme violence,” he said. The room was shaking so violently that he held on to avoid being thrown to the floor, praying that the pillar in his office would not topple over on him. After the shaking stopped, he navigated down three stories on a rickety ladder. þþKim Bolduc, the chief humanitarian coordinator for the mission, said she was sitting in her second-floor office in another United Nations building when the room shook violently and a huge crack opened in the wall in front of her. “I was just hoping it would stop,” she said. þþThe difficulties medical workers and rescue teams faced drew anguish far beyond Haiti’s borders. Dr. Irwin Redlener, a professor of pediatrics at Columbia University’s medical school who is also the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and the president of the Children’s Health Fund, said he feared for the children of Port-au-Prince.þþ“Something like 40 to 50 percent of the population of Port-au-Prince is kids,” he said. “Kids are much more fragile — a 30-pound block of a wall that would only seriously injure an adult will kill a child. They die much more rapidly of dehydration, of loss of blood, of shock. An infection will cause explosive diarrhea, which can kill a trapped child. Everything about this is devastatingly worse for kids than for adults.”þþ
Source: NY Times
