The Seahawk

Issue date: 1/13/10 Section: News

Media Credit: Chuck Liddy/Raleigh News & Observer/MCT Pfc. Christopher Jurgill, center, with Charlie Company 1/325th, gestures for people to move back from the front gate of the Port-au-Prince hospital complex as Ft. Bragg's 82nd Airborne Division is tasked with security, Tuesday, January 19, 2010.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti--As the confirmed death toll in Haiti's calamitous earthquake reached 70,000 Sunday, the flow of medical help, food and water to survivors began showing signs of improvement. However, persistent logistical logjams at the capital's airport complicated by sporadic, isolated violence kept many residents of the capital from receiving aid.

To ease demands in the capital, Haiti's Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said that Sunday the government plans to begin helping Port-au-Prince residents relocate to areas untouched by the quake outside the destroyed capital where they may be able to rely on relatives or better fend for themselves. Many people were beginning to leave the city on their own for the countryside to the North.

Bellerive said the government will begin bussing people outside Port-au-Prince as early as Wednesday, while relocating homeless people to spontaneous camps established by residents within the metropolitan area where distribution of aid can be focused and some measure of sanitation provided.

"I don't like the camp idea, but we have to regroup people in places where we can give them water, food and permit them to have a more decent life," Bellerive said.

Experts, meanwhile, warned that the window for finding additional survivors was closing fast, even as search and rescue teams from Israel, Turkey, the United States and elsewhere continued working around the clock. A total of 62 people, most of them Haitian citizens, have been rescued since the earthquake struck Jan. 12, White House officials said Sunday afternoon.

Tattered and hungry but clinging to hope, Haitians gathered early Sunday to pray amid the ruins of churches. They knelt on rocky debris, raised their arms in prayer, and sang aloud in the roofless sanctuary of the Cathedrale Notre-Dame de Port-au-Prince.

Many wore face masks, shielding themselves from the stench of decay and days with no running water. Others wore their Sunday best.

Continued...

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