Chile Struggles To Recover, Deals With Massive Looting

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Signs Of Life & Looting, In Quake-Hit City


Rescuers in this coastal city found signs of life in the wreckage of a 15-story building Monday as the world offered aid to victims of an earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 700 people. But the city also saw looters roaming the streets, and burning a looted supermarket, even after troops and police arrested dozens for violating a curfew.

Adding to the anguish, all six people aboard a small plane en route to Concepcion died in a crash on Monday. The passengers included university officials who intended to help with housing problems.

The toll of dead rose to 723, with 19 others missing, the National Emergency Office announced, in a magnitude-8.8 quake that President Michelle Bachelet called "an emergency without parallel in Chile's history."

Some coastal towns were almost obliterated — first shaken by the quake, then slammed by a tsunami that carried whole houses inland and crushed others into piles of sticks. Shocked survivors were left without power, water or food.

In the town of Constitucion alone, about 350 people died, state television quoted emergency officials as saying.

In Concepcion, the biggest city near the epicenter, rescuers heard the knock of trapped victims inside a toppled 70-unit apartment building and began to drill through thick walls to reach them, said fire department Commander Juan Carlos Subercaseux.

Only the chop of military helicopters flying overhead broke the silence demanded by rescuers straining to hear signs of life inside the building.

Since the quake early Saturday, firefighters had already pulled 25 survivors and nine bodies from the structure.

Food, Military slow to arrive

Mayor Jacqueline van Rysselberghe told Radio Cooperativa that some food aid was arriving in the city of 200,000 Monday for distribution to the hungry.

Electricity was still out, however, water was scarce and looters re-emerged at dusk despite beefed up security. Dozens of people sacked stores selling food, clothing and drugs, fleeing when police appeared to drive them away. Some struck gas stations, stealing cash from attendants.

As a small military convoy of drove down the main avenue, bystanders applauded and shouted, "Finally! Finally!" Some 10,000 troops have been promised for the area.

Concepcion police chief Eliecer Soler said officers arrested 55 people for violating a nighttime curfew imposed after looters sacked nearly every market in town Sunday. Troops ordered into the city by Bachelet patrolled to enforce security. A few looters re-emerged to rob a market on Monday.

Spanish professor Eduardo Aundez watched with disgust as a soldier patiently waited for looters to rummage through a downtown store, then lobbed two tear gas canisters into the rubble to get them out.

"I feel abandoned" by authorities, he said. "We believe the government didn't take the necessary measures in time, and now supplies of food and water are going to be much more complicated."

Across the Bio Bio River in the city of San Pedro, looters cleared out a shopping mall. A video store was set ablaze, two automatic teller machines were broken open, a bank was robbed and a supermarket emptied, its floor littered with mashed plums, scattered dog food and smashed liquor bottles.

"It was a mob. They looted everything," said police Sgt. Rene Gutierrez, who had his men guarding the now-empty mall. "Now we're only here to protect the building — what's left of the building."

He said police had been slow to reach the looted mall because one bridge over the river was collapsed and the other so damaged they had to move cautiously.

Aid from abroad

The U.N. said Monday that it would rush aid deliveries to Chile after Bachelet appealed for international aid. U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said Chile was seeking temporary bridges, field hospitals, satellite phones, electric generators, damage assessment teams, water purification systems, field kitchens and dialysis centers.

"We are prepared to provide assistance," Byrs told The Associated Press in Geneva. "It could be quite fast, given that our experts are on standby and were alerted in the region."

The World Health Organization said it expected the death toll to rise in the coming days as communications improve. For survivors, it said access to health services will be a major challenge and noted that indigenous people living in adobe homes were most at risk from heavily damaged infrastructure.


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Sources: MSNBC, Google Maps

Anderson Cooper Saves Haitian Boy; Haiti Death Toll 200,000+

Anderson Cooper
AC360° Anchor


Anderson In The Midst Of Looting Chaos



We were covering another story when we heard shots being fired. We ran toward the sound and found a store being looted. Two Haitian police officers were occasionally firing into the air to try to keep order, but that only worked for a few moments, then the looting would begin again.

They were stealing boxes of candles. An American businessman named Tony who owns two stores nearby barricaded one street to keep looters away. He had armed the two Haitian police with automatic weapons, and they were assisting him, but they were not able to control anything beyond their barricade.

It quickly became a free-for-all. Young men began fighting one another for the stolen items. A number of young men had knives, and planks of wood, screwdrivers and rocks. They were using their improvised weapons to threaten and injure others who had stolen items from the store. The robbers were now being robbed. One group of looters whipped another man with a leather belt. They punched him as well, and they stole the sack of goods he'd just stolen.

I was in the midst of the melee with Charlie Moore, my producer, Neil Hallsworth my cameraman, Vlad Duthiers, my translator, and there was a still photographer from Getty Images with us, photojournalist Jonathan Torgovnik. As things got really out of control, I saw a looter on the roof of the store they'd broken into throw what I think was part of a concrete block into the crowd. It hit a small boy in the head.

I saw him collapse. More chunks of concrete were being thrown at the looters on the roof. The injured boy couldn't get up. He'd try and then collapse again. Blood was pouring from his head. He was conscious but had no control over his body. I was afraid someone on the roof would see him lying there and throw another cinder block piece onto him. I was afraid he'd get killed. No one seemed to be helping him.

I ran to where he was struggling, and picked him up off the ground. I brought him to a spot about a hundred feet away. I could feel his warm blood on my arms. I stood him up, but he was clearly unable to walk. He wiped his bloody face, and I tried to reassure him. He had no idea where he was, and he clearly couldn't walk, so I picked him up again and handed him over to someone behind that makeshift barricade. Tony, the American businessman, gave the boy a wet towel. He was then taken away by someone else. We don't know what happened to him.

I hope he's ok.





Haiti Quake: Death toll May Be 200,000, US General Says


The leading US general in Haiti has said it is a "reasonable assumption" that up to 200,000 people may have died in last Tuesday's earthquake.

Lt Gen Ken Keen said the disaster was of "epic proportions", but it was "too early to know" the full human cost.

Rescuers pulled more people alive from the rubble at the weekend, but at least 70,000 people have already had burials.

Relief efforts are being slowed by bottlenecks, and many thousands of survivors are fending for themselves.

Many Haitians are trying to leave the devastated capital city, Port-au-Prince, and there are security concerns amid reports of looting and violence.

More than 2,000 US marines were expected to arrive in the region on Monday to bolster US troops and UN peacekeepers already on the ground.

In Brussels, European Union nations pledged more than 420m euros ($604m; £320m) from the EU budget to assist Haiti, with about half the sum dedicated to emergency and short-term aid.

At least 200m euros will be dedicated to funding medium- to long-term rebuilding efforts.

"We recognize that more aid and support is needed, and more has been agreed," EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton told reporters, adding that the EU was working closely with the United Nations, the US and others.

European ministers were also discussing deploying a security mission to help maintain law and order.

On Monday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he would recommend that the UN Security Council boost police and troop numbers in Haiti by 3,500.

It came a day after he appealed to frustrated Haitians to be patient over efforts to bring them relief.

Gen Keen, running the US military relief effort, when asked about death toll estimates of between 150,000 and 200,000 people, said: "I think the international community is looking at those figures, and I think that's a start point.

"Clearly, this is a disaster of epic proportions, and we've got a lot of work ahead of us."

Hope for more rescues

Amid the chaos and destruction, a number of people were rescued from collapsed buildings at the weekend.

Among the lucky ones was a seven-year-old girl pulled alive from the ruins of a supermarket.

At the UN headquarters destroyed in the earthquake, rescuers lifted a Danish staff member alive from the ruins, just 15 minutes after the secretary general visited the site.

And US teams with search dogs also rescued a 16-year-old Dominican girl trapped for five days in a small, three-storey hotel.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) said on Monday that American teams had pulled 10 people alive from the rubble the day before.

"According to rescue officials, this is the largest number of rescues in a single day in decades of earthquake search and rescue efforts," it said in a statement.

While hopes dim with every passing day, a South African rescue official, Colin Diner, told the BBC he hoped there would be more people found alive.

"What we are seeing is that the buildings have a whole lot of openings, collapsed voids and things, and that always gives you a better opportunity," he said.

UN humanitarian chief John Holmes told reporters on Monday that there were now 43 search and rescue teams on the ground, with 1,700 people involved in the effort.

"More than 70 people have been pulled from the wreckage in the last few days," he said, saying that efforts to find those trapped in the rubble would carry on until there was no longer hope of finding anyone alive.

He played down worries over security, saying that despite incidents of violence, the overall situation was one of calm.

Homeless throng streets

Correspondents say there is a sense of movement at last with the relief effort, although the amount of supplies getting through is still small.

The BBC's Mark Doyle says that in a slum community in the hills above Port-au-Prince, people have yet to see any government officials or aid workers.

They have camped out on waste ground and are fending for themselves, he says, pulling together to survive.

Meanwhile, our correspondent says, perhaps 5,000 people are lined up in the baking sun outside the US embassy, desperate to get visas to join relatives among the large Haitian-American community in the US.

Several agencies have complained about not being able to get aid through the airport in Port-au-Prince, which is heavily congested and has been taken over by the US military.

Medecins Sans Frontieres urged commanders to speed up the landing of planes carrying medical supplies, after one carrying an inflatable field hospital was turned away on Saturday night.

But Mr Holmes said that initial issues were now being resolved with the introduction through the World Food programme of a slot system to prioritise humanitarian flights.

The head of the US operation at the airport, Col Buck Elton, said on Sunday there had been 600 take-offs and landings since the US took control on Wednesday, and 50 flights had been diverted.

About 60% of the flights coming in were civilian and 40% military, he said.

US troops also said they had set up their first foothold outside the airport to deliver aid carried in by helicopters.

Port-au-Prince's port is badly damaged, and many roads are still blocked by corpses and debris, hampering the delivery of fuel and other supplies.

The Haitian and Dominican Republic governments are planning an alternative 130km (80 mile) humanitarian road corridor to deliver relief from the southern Dominican town of Barahona, the UN said.

Mr Holmes said the UN expected to resolve problems with bringing in fuel from the Dominican Republic in the next day or two.

The UN has launched an appeal for $562m (£346m) intended to help three million people for six months, most of whom are thought to need emergency relief.

The British government has said it will treble its aid to Haiti to £20m ($32m).



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Sources: AP, CNN, AC360, The Daily Beast, BBC News, Google Maps