Survivors flee Haiti's capital

Haitians fled their quake-wrecked capital in the hundreds of thousands today amid government promises of refuge in safe, clean tent cities.

Aid workers said 200,000 people crammed into buses, nearly swamped ferries and set out on foot to escape Port-au-Prince. For those who stayed, engineers started levelling land for tent cities, supposedly temporary, that are meant to house 400,000 people.

The goal is to halt the spread of disease at hundreds of impromptu settlements that have no water and no place for sewage.

Homeless families have erected tarpaulins and tents, cardboard and scrap as shelter from the sun, but they will be useless once the summer rainy season hits.

The new camps “are going to be going to places where they will have at least some adequate facilities,” Fritz Longchamp, chief of staff to President Rene Preval, said.

Rescue crews began abandoning hope of finding the final survivors of the magnitude-7.0 quake.

Armies of foreign aid donors instead turned their attention to expanding their pipeline of food, water and medical care for survivors.

With extensive swathes of Port-au-Prince in ruins, more than 500 makeshift settlements with a population of about 472,000 are now scattered around the capital.

Many people are just trying to get out of the capital, often back to the farms or provincial homes of their parents or relatives.

The US Agency for International Development said that as many as 200,000 Haitians have fled the capital and many more are trying to do so.

It suggests that at least 100,000 people have fled to Gonaives, a city of about 280,000 that itself is still recovering from back-to-back hurricanes in 2008.

The flight from Port-au-Prince is a reversal of decades of migration out of a countryside where deforestation and erosion have impoverished the land.

Haiti estimates the quake killed 200,000 people. It said 250,000 were injured and two million made homeless.

The disaster has prompted what the Red Cross calls the greatest deployment of emergency responders in its 91-year history.

“We are planning to flood the country with food,” Myrta Kaulard, country director of the UN World Food Programme, said.

To speed that flood, the US Army, Navy and Coast Guard are trying to patch up the Haitian capital’s only functional industrial pier, which is key to getting in large aid shipments as well as to Haiti’s long-term recovery.

Only four ships have been able to dock at the pier, where 15-inch-wide cracks make it risky to let more than one truck work at a time. The port’s cranes are now destroyed or tip dangerously, and damage is so extensive that military officials do not know how long it will take before ships can dock and unload in large quantities.

Damage at another port is limiting fuel shipments. No tanker has been able to land since the quake damaged the country’s main oil terminal, on the edge of Haiti’s most dangerous slum. That has forced petrol stations to depend on tankers driving in from the neighbouring Dominican Republic.

At the south of Haiti’s main bay, near the earthquake’s epicentre, the US Navy and Coast Guard set up a triage centre amid the rusting motorboats, with dozens of military doctors treating the most urgent casualties on the lawn.