Quake rescues continue as Haitians wait for aid

Rescuers pulled a dehydrated but otherwise uninjured woman from the ruins of a luxury hotel in the Haitian capital early today, an event greeted with applause from onlookers witnessing rare good news in a city otherwise filled with corpses, rubble and desperation.

“It’s a little miracle,” the woman’s husband, Reinhard Riedl, said after hearing she was alive in the wreckage.

“She’s one tough cookie. She is indestructible.”

For many, though, the five days since the magnitude-7.0 quake hit have turned into an aching wait for the food, water and medical care slowly making its way from an overwhelmed airport rife with political squabbles.

And while aid is reaching the country, growing impatience among the suffering has spawned some violence.

Nobody knows how many died in Tuesday’s quake. Haiti’s government alone has already recovered 20,000 bodies – not counting those recovered by independent agencies or relatives themselves, said Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive.

The Pan American Health Organisation now says 50,000 to 100,000 people perished in the quake. Bellerive said 100,000 would “seem to be the minimum”.

A UN humanitarian spokeswoman declared the quake the worst disaster the international organisation has ever faced, since so much government and UN capacity in the country was demolished.

In that way, Elisabeth Byrs said in Geneva, it’s worse than the cataclysmic Asian tsunami of 2004: “Everything is damaged.”

Truckloads of corpses were being trundled to mass graves yesterday. Search teams also recovered the body of Tunisian diplomat Hedi Annabi, the United Nations chief of mission in Haiti, and other top UN officials who were killed when their headquarters collapsed.

Experts have said rescue of people trapped beneath wreckage after three days is unlikely. But an American team pulled a woman alive from a collapsed university building where she had been trapped for 97 hours. Another crew got water to three survivors whose shouts could be heard deep in the collapsed ruins of a multi-storey supermarket.

At the Hotel Montana, the son of co-owner Nadine Cardoso said he could hear her voice from the rubble, and the effort to pull her to safety began. Twelve hours later, with more than 20 friends and relatives of the prominent community member watching early today, she was lowered from a hill of debris on a stretcher.

The rescue was bittersweet for Cardoso’s sister, because rescuers also told Gerthe Cardoso they had abandoned a search for her seven-year-old grandson after an aftershock closed a space where he was believed to be.

Later today, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was expected to arrive in Haiti to discuss aid delivery, which appeared to be speeding up.

The Haitian government has established 14 distribution points for food and other supplies, and US Army helicopters scouted locations for more. Aid groups opened five emergency health centres. Vital gear, such as water-purification units, was arriving from abroad.

On a hillside golf course, perhaps 50,000 people were sleeping in a makeshift tent city overlooking the stricken capital. Paratroopers of the US 82nd Airborne Division flew there yesterday to set up a base for handing out water and food.

After the initial frenzy among the waiting crowd, when helicopters could only hover and toss out their cargo, a second flight landed and soldiers passed out some 2,000 military-issue ready-to-eat meals to an orderly line of Haitians.

But aid delivery was still bogged down by congestion at the Port-au-Prince airport, quake damage at the seaport, poor roads and the fear of looters and robbers.

The airport congestion also touched off diplomatic rows between the US military and other donor nations. France and Brazil both lodged official complaints that the US military, in control of the international airport, had denied landing permission to relief flights from their countries.

Haitian President Rene Preval urged all to “keep our cool and coordinate and not throw accusations.”

As relief teams grappled with on-the-ground obstacles, US leadership promised to step up aid efforts. US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited and pledged more American assistance.

President Barack Obama met with former Presidents George W Bush and Bill Clinton in Washington and urged Americans to donate to Haiti relief efforts.