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| Devastating earthquake | ||
| Scavengers look for goods amid the rubble of collapsed buildings in Port-au-Prince. | ||
As thousands of bodies piled up in the streets decomposing in the heat, fear and anger spread through the city. One United Nations truck trying to deliver food had to pull away as it was mobbed by a crowd. Bands of young men, some armed, roamed the streets looking for food and water.
Hundreds of bodies were stacked outside the city morgue, and limbs of the dead protruded from the rubble of crushed schools and homes. A few workers were able to free people who had been trapped under the rubble for days, but others attended to the grim task of using bulldozers to transport loads of bodies. For the survivors, worries turned to a possible outbreak of diseases including malaria.
Haitian President Rene Preval told The Miami Herald that over a 20-hour period government crews had removed 7,000 corpses from the streets and morgues and buried them in mass graves. The International Red Cross estimated that up to 50,000 people were killed in the quake.
The U.N. World Food Program (WFP) said post-quake looting of its food supplies long stored in Port-au-Prince appears to have been limited, contrary to an earlier report Friday. It said it would start handing out 6,000 tons of food aid recovered from a damaged warehouse in the city's Cite Soleil slum.
A spokeswoman for the Rome-based agency, Emilia Casella, said the WFP was preparing shipments of enough ready-to-eat meals to feed 2 million Haitians for a month. Still, getting relief to the people has been a nightmare.
Relief groups on the border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti carrying medical supplies Friday turned around to await military escorts after hearing reports of violence along the route to the capital, said Rahul Singh, director of the relief group Global Medic.
Haitian refugees overwhelmed a tiny local hospital in the border town of Jimani with injuries ranging from cuts and bruises to serious crush injuries, such as a broken pelvis. Some of the wounds had become gangrenous because the victims had not been able to get medical care.
"Nobody knows what they are doing," said Mike Howett, a general surgeon from Canada who is volunteering with Global Medics.
President Obama warned Friday that it will take a long time to restore a semblance of order in the devastated nation. "There are going to be many difficult days ahead," Obama said at the White House. "So many people are in need of assistance."
Obama has said the scale of the relief effort will be one of the largest in recent history. He promised a $100 million relief effort in response to Tuesday's magnitude-7.0 quake, which has left the hemisphere's poorest nation without basic services such as water and power, much less a functioning government.
On Friday, he called Preval and again pledged his support for Haiti's recovery and rebuilding effort. Preval told Obama he was touched by the friendship of Americans and "from the bottom of my heart and on behalf of the Haitian people, thank you, thank you, thank you."
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