Thursday 14 January 2010

Haiti quake survivors spend second night in streets

Thousands of Haitians are spending a second night in the open after the country's catastrophic earthquake which may have killed tens of thousands.
Medical aid agency Medecins sans Frontieres reported a "massive influx" of casualties at its makeshift clinics, many of them with severe injuries.
The search for survivors under the rubble went on after darkness.
Substantial foreign aid for the three million people said to be in need is due to begin arriving within hours.
The first US aid planes have already landed at the airport serving the capital, Port-au-Prince, and US naval ships are on the way.

EYEWITNESS
Matthew Price
Matthew Price, BBC News, Haiti
Twenty-four hours after the earthquake, and we flew into Port-au-Prince. Just along the tarmac we found some aid trickling in. The airport buildings here have been damaged but not, it seems, the runway.
Many of those who can, are leaving. Millions, though, are left behind in a country that can barely function, even without a disaster.
The leadership here says 100,000 have been killed. Many of the UN peacekeepers stationed here are also among the dead. This country - so often forgotten by the world - now needs its help more than ever.
EU states, Russia and China are among those sending rescue and medical teams by plane while pledges of aid have been made by countries around Latin America.
UN peacekeepers, who played a key role in maintaining public order in Haiti even before the quake, have been deployed to control any outbreaks of unrest as reports come in of looting.
The BBC's Andy Gallacher in Port-au-Prince says the situation in the capital is increasingly desperate with no sense of a coordinated rescue effort, scant medical supplies and aid only trickling in.
With many of Haiti's communication lines down, Haitians living abroad have been battling to get through to relatives.
In the main Haitian community in the US, Miami's Little Haiti, people have been meeting to pray and to raise money for relief efforts.
Sleeping among the dead
The 7.0-magnitude quake, Haiti's worst in two centuries, struck at 1653 local time (2153 GMT) on Tuesday, just 15km (10 miles) south-west of Port-au-Prince and close to the surface.
Haitian children sleep with their mother at a UN hospital in Port-au-Prince, evening of 13 January
The luckier survivors have been treated by UN and MSF medics
The energy released was the equivalent of about half a megaton of TNT, according to Prof Roger Searle, of the earth sciences department at the UK's Durham University.
BBC correspondents in Port-au-Prince say the night is punctuated with the sounds of people crying and praying.
They have described people sleeping among dead bodies in the grounds of one hospital, and say many streets are lined with corpses covered with white blankets.
Efforts to rescue survivors trapped in rubble have been hampered by the lack of heavy lifting equipment and much of the work is being done by individuals with simple tools or their hands.
Patients with "severe traumas, head wounds, crushed limbs" have been streaming into MSF's temporary structures but the agency is only able to offer them basic medical care, spokesman Paul McPhun told reporters in Toronto.
One of MSF's emergency medical facilities collapsed during the quake while the other two were so badly damaged they became unusable, he said.
At least 1,000 people have sought help at three temporary MSF sites, including some 50 people who were treated for burns caused by domestic gas containers exploding in collapsing buildings.
Hans van Dillen, an MSF worker in Port-au-Prince, reported that there were "hundreds of thousands of people who are sleeping in the streets because they are homeless".
"We see open fractures, head injuries," he said on MSF's website. "The problem is that we cannot forward people to proper surgery at this stage."
The aid agency, which is concerned about the welfare of many of its 800 local employees and their families, said it was dispatching 70 more international aid workers to Haiti to bolster its team.
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