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Red Cross Estimates Haiti's Earthquake Killed Up To 50,000; Obama Pledges $100 Million In Aid
A Haitian Red Cross official estimated that between 45,000 and 50,000 people were killed in Tuesday's devastating earthquake in this impoverished capital, and President Obama pledged $100 million in aid to support what he called one of the largest international relief efforts in history.
"No one knows with precision, no one can confirm a figure," Victor Jackson, an assistant national coordinator with Haiti's Red Cross, told Reuters news service when giving the estimated death toll Thursday. "We also think there are 3 million people affected throughout the country, either injured or homeless."
International rescue teams began arriving in Port-au-Prince early Thursday, after U.S. military personnel secured the airport and readied it to receive heavy earth-moving equipment and emergency personnel around the clock.
But the influx was interrupted Thursday afternoon when the Federal Aviation Administration halted all civilian flights from the United states to Haiti at the request of the Haitian government because the airport tarmac was clogged with planes unloading relief supplies. The airport also lacks sufficient fuel stocks to refuel departing flights, officials said.
Nine U.S. planes were already in the air when the FAA issued the order, an official said.
In New York, meanwhile, U.N. emergency relief coordinator John Holmes said the world body will need hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance to respond to the earthquake.
Huge numbers of people in the capital lack food, clean water, shelter and medical care, according to officials in Haiti and in Washington, and it was clear that the global assistance effort could not materialize fast enough.
In the heart of the devastation, Haitians set up makeshift camps on the sidewalk or slept in the streets, unable to return to crumbled homes and having no other safe place to go. Survivors salvaged mattresses, plastic chairs, bits of cardboard and food from the rubble.
One man urged his dozing neighbors to wake up and help pull bodies from shattered buildings. People wandered, wrapped in bedsheets and toting toddlers with terrified eyes.
The 7.0-magnitude quake on Tuesday devastated the coastal sprawl of the Haitian capital, leveling once-grand buildings, makeshift shacks, historic gingerbread homes and cinder-block structures. Caked in the flour-white dust of crushed plaster and cement, Haitians dug out family members by hand and piled bodies on street corners, as clusters of bloodied and dazed survivors pleaded for help.
The government, itself depleted by death and injury, appeared unable to mount a significant rescue effort in the hemisphere's poorest nation.
Obama pledged that the immediate rescue of Haiti's people, as well as its long-term recovery, will be a top U.S. priority. Flanked by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Vice President Biden, he said the military has begun a 24-hour-a-day airlift of water and medicine. The Army's 82nd Airborne Division will arrive later Thursday to help patrol the streets, and the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort is en route, Obama said.
"Help is arriving. Much, much more help is on the way," Obama said, speaking about the crisis from the White House for the second consecutive day. At the same time, he acknowledged, "none of this will seem quick enough if you have a loved one who is trapped, if you're sleeping on the streets, if you can't feed your children."
The president warned that distribution of the goods and services arriving on the island will be difficult, with a primitive network of two-lane roads in tatters in many places, the main port badly damaged and communications only just beginning to recover.
"Even as we move as quickly as possible, it will take hours -- and in many cases days -- to get all of our people and resources on the ground," Obama said.
A Global mobilization
Capitals from Brasilia to Beijing are putting together aid packages and organizing search missions. Early Thursday, an Air China plane carrying a search-and-rescue crew, medics, seismological experts and tons of supplies landed at the Port-au-Prince airport, followed by three French planes with aid and a mobile hospital, the Associated Press reported. A British relief team arrived in neighboring Dominican Republic.
The Chinese team had honed its rescue skills after a massive earthquake devastated part of southwestern China in May 2008, a catastrophe which, like the one in Haiti, sparked a global response. Brazil has sent three jets carrying 21 tons of equipment. Spain has sent planes with surgical teams. The Israeli army dispatched two planeloads of rescue personnel and equipment to set up a field hospital, the AP said.
The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson was expected to arrive off the coast Thursday, officials said, and the Navy said the amphibious assault ship USS Bataan had been ordered to sail as soon as possible with a 2,000-member Marine unit. The Los Angeles County Fire Department's 72-member urban search-and-rescue team departed from California late Wednesday, the AP said.
An elite search-and-rescue team from Fairfax County is already in Port-au-Prince, and early Thursday succeeded in rescuing one U.N. security guard from an enormous pile of rubble at the agency's collapsed headquarters, officials said.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon identified the man as Tarmo Joveer, a 38-year-old Estonian police officer. Ban said rescue workers heard scratching sounds coming from beneath the wreckage and lowered a rubber pipe 12 feet below the street to supply Joveer with water.
"It was a small miracle during the night that brought few other miracles," Ban said during a briefing in New York. A total of 22 U.N. peacekeepers and police have been confirmed dead, Ban said, and as many as 150 U.N. staff remain unaccounted for in the wreckage of the Christopher Hotel, where the agency's headquarters were housed.
Ban said there is still no word from the U.N. chief in Haiti, Hédi Annabi, who is believed to be trapped under the rubble. "I hope he is okay," he said. "I pray for him."
Help from the United States
Ban said that he spoke to Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to ask for more engineers, medical supplies, and helicopters. He said the United Nations, not the United States, would take the lead in coordinating the humanitarian response to the earthquake, with a new special representative to Haiti -- Edmond Mulet -- expected to arrive in the country Thursday afternoon to take charge of the U.N. mission and the relief effort.
"The overall picture remains still sketchy," Ban told reporters. But the "facts as far as we know it are grim."
The 72-member rescue team from Fairfax County has established an operating base on the grounds of the American Embassy, about two miles from the airport. It is working under the auspices of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is directing the U.S. relief effort.
The initial $100 million U.S. investment will grow in the coming year, Obama said. He urged Americans to continue giving money to the relief efforts. Secretary of State Clinton, speaking earlier in a televised interview, said $3 million had already been donated to the American Red Cross.
"You will not be forsaken," Obama told Haitians. "You will not be forgotten. In this, your hour of greatest need, America stands with you."
Clinton's husband, former president Bill Clinton, serves as the United Nations special envoy to Haiti. He and former president George W. Bush have agreed to a request from Obama to lead America's humanitarian and relief efforts to the battered country, aides to both men said Thursday.
The partnership would be similar to one that Clinton and former president George H.W. Bush formed -- at the request of then-President George W. Bush -- in the wake of the Asian tsunami in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
John Holmes, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said Wednesday that -- unlike the headquarters building -- U.N. relief agencies were relatively unscathed by the earthquake and would be in a fairly good position to mount relief operations on the ground.
"My own staff there, they are okay, they're safe, reasonably intact," Holmes said, adding that the World Food Program was flying in 90 metric tons of high-protein biscuits for displaced earthquake victims. "We can kick-start the operation."
Searching for Bodies
On the outskirts of the Haitian capital, two cranes and dozens of rescue workers scooped up gravel, dust and wood beams Wednesday from a four-story building that had collapsed the day before. Three bodies had been removed from the pile earlier in the day, and as night fell, the men worked to rescue three more believed to be trapped in what had been offices. Some used plastic buckets to move the plaster and scattered wood.
As he watched the effort, Dunois Jean-Baptiste, 44, recalled the "huge dust cloud and . . . big rumbling" of the previous day.
"We heard people calling for help," he said.
Haitian President René Préval lamented that injured people have been lying in the streets since the quake struck, saying, "We don't have the capacity to bring them to the hospital."
"There are risks that houses continue to collapse," he told CNN. "There are risks of an epidemic."
Health Concerns
Public health officials in Washington echoed those concerns. The Pan American Health Organization dispatched a team of experts from Panama to assist in the management of mass casualties, the delivery of emergency medical care and the disposal of bodies.
"We fear the impact of this earthquake will be particularly devastating due to the vulnerability of Haiti's people," said Jon K. Andrus, the organization's deputy director.
Years of political strife and a devastating 2008 hurricane season have left Haiti a volatile nation with battered roads, a weak public health system and a landscape of slums that witnesses said Wednesday had largely collapsed across the capital.
"An unknown number, tens if not hundreds of thousands, have suffered varying degrees of destruction to their homes," Vincenzo Pugliese, deputy spokesman for the U.N. mission in Haiti, said in a statement. He said that "major transport routes have been severely disrupted" by debris, smashed vehicles and cracks in the ground.
Within a fearful Haitian diaspora following the tragedy through grim television images, relatives scoured the Internet and taxed the already weak communications links to the country in search of information about their loved ones.
The quake's epicenter was about 10 miles west of Port-au-Prince, home to as much as a third of the country's population of 9 million.
Much of the resort city of Jacmel -- a popular tourist destination whose architecture was a major influence on New Orleans -- appears to have been destroyed as well, according to the Agence France-Presse news agency. About 40,000 people live in the port city.
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Sources: Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, Google Maps
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