“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.
Mr. Verpre’s father risked his own life to save his son’s, crouching deep into the hole with a blowtorch to try to wear away the metal that had his son’s leg pinned down inside. 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 struggling to prevent those numbers from rising. On street corners, people pulled their shirts up over their faces to filter out the thickening smell of the dead.
With reports of looting and scuffles over water and food, President Obama promised $100 million in aid, as the first wave of a projected 5,000 American troops began arriving to provide security and the infrastructure for the expected flood of aid from around the world.
“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.”
Help was only beginning to arrive Thursday as the United States military took over the wrecked air traffic control system to land cargo planes with food and water, though the airport was clogged and chaotic with little or no fuel for planes to return. Doctors and search-and-rescue teams worked mostly with the few materials in 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 earlier in the day 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.”
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.”
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 troops 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...
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