It became increasingly, brutally clear: Port-au-Prince is a entombed Graveyard
Pastor Dale Morgan
It became increasingly, brutally clear: Port-au-Prince is a entombed
Graveyard*
A few survivors were being dug out of the ruins – rare moments of joy
amid the worsening horrors that are overwhelming rescue workers
* Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent
* The Guardian, Friday 15 January 2010
A man makes his way through bodies in Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Some were left beside the rubble, others were shrouded under sheets and
lined up in rows, others were packed and stacked in pick-up trucks:
there was no escaping the dead of Port-au-Prince today.
The general hospital, its services all but collapsed, became host to a
growing army of corpses. Carried, dragged and wheeled there, their ranks
swelled by the hour, from dozens to hundreds, to more than a thousand.
"I can't say how many more bodies will be brought here," the hospital
director, Guy LaRoche, told Reuters.
It was day three in Haiti's capital, and if anything the horror
worsened. At the Ecole Normale Delmas, teams extracted the bodies of
teenage schoolgirls in orange uniforms; their faces were smashed.
Laura Bickle, an orphanage worker, said: "They are pulling people out of
the rubble, literally, blood running in the gutter like water."
The city's parks were filled with people with no homes or shelter to
which they could go. Many of them erected shades from sheets and wood to
protect themselves from the sun.
While they appeared mostly calm, and efforts elsewhere concentrated on
rescue, last night came the first reports that patience could be wearing
thin. Angry protesters reportedly set up roadblocks using dead bodies to
signal their anger at the lack of aid, Reuters reported.
Haiti's Red Cross said the toll could be between 45,000 and 50,000, with
3 million or more hurt or homeless. Seemingly everywhere, limbs covered
in dust poked from the rubble, some stiff and pointing to a tropical sky
criss-crossed, on occasion, by helicopters and aeroplanes.
In places there were moans and muffled cries beneath the ruins, spurring
frantic efforts to dig people out with bare hands and improvised tools.
There were glimpses of joy: an Estonian UN worker freed from rubble
clenched his fist in jubilation; there were celebrations as Gladys Louis
Jeune was rescued smiling and alive after 43 hours in the rubble. But
they did not change what became brutally clear: Port-au-Prince was a tomb.
"It's the worst I've ever seen," Bob Poff, the Salvation Army's director
of disaster services in Haiti, told CNN. "It's so much devastation in a
concentrated area."
The network's medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, gave the bleakest
assessment. "What I have seen here, I've never seen before. While I hate
to say this, it seems somewhat hopeless."
Workers said finding survivors under the rubble was a race against
time; the vast majority would die within three days – in which case that
race will soon be lost. UN peacekeepers seemed overwhelmed by scenes of
armageddon.
"We just don't know what to do," a Chilean told Reuters. "You can see
how terrible the damage is. We've not been able to get into all areas."
A few police were seen loading bodies into a van but most officers were
absent, presumably dead, injured or trying to taking care of their own
families.
With communications mostly still down Twitter once again became a
resource for those desperately seeking news of loved ones. From
@LadyDior47: do you know what neighborhood rue l'enterrement is in? My
aunt owns a store there. I cannot get in contact with her :("
The clinics and hospitals still standing were crammed. Some survivors
had feet or arms twisted at unnatural angles, others had bandages
dripping blood.
In one hospital, which appeared to have just a handful of doctors, a man
with his injured daughter told the BBC: "I need help ... the kid is
dying, and she's frightened; she needs to go to the operating room, but
there's no help. The rest of my family ... they buried them somewhere, I
wonder what happened to them. Here is my last daughter, I'm trying to
keep her alive, and I need help."
The Red Cross said it was overwhelmed and out of medicine and body bags.
The head of Médecins du Monde, Olivier Bernard, told AFP aid would need
to arrive by last night to save lives.
Patients with traumas, head wounds or crushed limbs poured into Médecins
Sans Frontières's temporary structures but it could only offer basic
care, Paul McPhun told reporters. "The smell's nauseating. Bodies lie
out on the lawn, among them lie the injured; inside, screams and
whimpers of those in pain echo down corridors."
Almost every turn presented a nightmare scene. A dead abandoned baby. A
man with stumps for legs. A woman on an unfolded box, blood pooling beneath.
In the Hotel Villa Creole, guests with no medical training tended
strangers. "These people have nowhere else to go," Anne Wanlund, an
office worker from Washington DC, told the Miami Herald as she picked
pieces of concrete out of a woman's head wound. In the lobby Judithe
Jacques, who brought in her mother Marguerite with a broken knee, fought
back tears. "Where are the doctors? We expected doctors."
Infrastructure and any semblance of the state had collapsed, but the
city, in normal times a byword for lawlessness, displayed solidarity and
stoicism. However, there were warnings that isolated cases of shooting
and looting could spread.
"The streets are now Haiti's living room and bedroom, with everything
closed," said Richard Morse, manager of the Hotel Oloffson, made famous
in Graham Greene's The Comedians. "Money, food, drinks, supplies,
rotting bodies, impatience, despair will all become a problem. "
Planes laden with supplies were landing at the airport, but doctors
worried dehydration and disease might outpace them. "Money's worth
nothing right now; water is the currency," said a foreign aid worker. A
power blackout, scant water and medicine, and decomposing corpses made
a lethal cocktail, Peter Hotez, head of the department of microbiology
at George Washington University, told CNN.
"What you have is the perfect storm of infection. It is already a
fragile infrastructure with high rates of infectious tropical disease.
"Now there are potential breakdowns in sanitation, clean water, housing
… it's a terrible mix."