Four more miners have been pulled out alive from a flooded coal mine in northern China, more than a week after being trapped. Nine others were rescued earlier Monday morning.
State television says rescuers are preparing to pull as many as 70 to 80 miners out of the mine, though conditions underground remain complicated.
The first rescue early Monday morning had seemed beyond hope for days before crews heard tapping from deep underground Friday.
The first survivor was brought to the surface at 40 minutes past midnight Monday, 179 hours after the Wangjialing mine filled with water. A crowd of rescue workers, miners and security workers outside the entrance of the mine shaft clapped as the miners were carried out.
The initial nine men were among 153 trapped since March 28 when workers broke a wall into a water-filled abandoned shaft. China Central Television said more miners could still be alive, but did not give any details.
State television showed the miners wrapped in blankets, placed in ambulances and rushed to a hospital where teams of doctors and nurses had been standing by for several days. Reporters who did not belong to state media were prevented from getting close to the site.
As they were taken into the hospital in Hejin city, about 30 miles from the mine, the miners' eyes were covered to shield them from the bright lights. Some were hooked up to intravenous drips.
The official Xinhua News Agency reported that their blood pressure and heart rates were normal after spending nearly 7½ days trapped underground. It quoted one of the survivors, Li Guoyu, 38, from Henan province in central China, as saying they had gone without water because they were worried about drinking the dirty water flowing in the tunnel.
About 3,000 people have worked around the clock using 14 pumps to suck the water out of the mine in Shanxi province.
A glimmer of hope emerged Friday when rescuers heard knocking on a pipe that had been drilled into the mine. But no sounds were heard after that as workers frantically pumped water out and sent divers into the mine to scout conditions.
CCTV did not say how may other survivors there may be. Xinhua reported that swaying lamp lights were seen at the other side of a V-shaped shaft in the mine, indicating people might be there.
CCTV said the bottom of the V-shaped shaft had emerged as the water level fell.
A preliminary investigation last week found that the mine's managers ignored water leaks before the accident, the State Administration of Work Safety said.
China's coal mines are the world's deadliest. Accidents killed 2,631 coal miners in China last year, down from 6,995 deaths in 2002, the most dangerous year on record, according to the State Administration of Coal Mine Safety.
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.
Fifteen days after her house collapsed around her as she showered, a 16-year-old girl was rescued Wednesday -- weak, thirsty and very much alive -- on a rubble-strewn hillside in the capital.
Hundreds of Haitians shouted with joy when French rescuers finished digging and pulled Darline Etienne from a jumble of concrete and steel, wrapped her in a golden foil blanket and hurried her to an ambulance.
"It's a miracle," said a British police chaplain who offered the girl a wooden cross. When she was too weak to take it, he wrapped it around her hand.
"She's breathing pretty weakly. She's very dehydrated, but she will be fine," said Christopher Renou, a French rescuer. "We're very optimistic that she will be fine."
It was the second remarkable rescue in the Haitian capital within the past 24 hours. In a nation that has counted its dead by tens of thousands, Etienne's survival provided a rare moment of pure happiness.
The rescue followed more than five hours of digging. It began when a group of young men picked their way along the hillside and heard a voice.
"I said, 'Is someone here?' " Roosevelt Luc recalled.
A man was pulled from rubble in Haiti's capital on Tuesday, two weeks after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake leveled much of the city, officials said.
Ricot Duprevil, 31, was in stable condition at a medical facility where he was being treated for a broken leg, medical and rescue officials told CNN. Duprevil had access to water while he was trapped, the officials said.
The man was discovered by the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division's Delta Company. Troops with the company said they were conducting a rubble-clearing mission in downtown Port-au-Prince when they spotted movement amidst the crushed concrete.
The Haitian government announced late last week that it was switching rescue efforts to recovery operations even as others were found alive.
A Haitian man has been pulled alive from the rubble of a ruined hotel after 11 days, as the official search for quake survivors was declared over.
The 23-year-old man was carried on a stretcher from the Napoli Inn Hotel in the capital, Port-au-Prince.
Haitians and rescuers cheered as the man, seen to be smiling, was taken towards a waiting ambulance, the BBC's Adam Mynott reports from the scene.
Earlier, Haiti's government said search-and-rescue operations had ended.
UN spokeswoman Elizabeth Byrs in Geneva said the decision was "heartbreaking" but that it had been taken on the advice of experts.
She said most search-and-rescue teams would now be leaving Haiti, although some with heavy lifting equipment might stay to help with the clean-up operation and with aid distribution.
Rescuers said the man found on Saturday appeared to be in good condition, but thirsty.
The BBC's Adam Mynott says the operation to extricate him lasted about two-and-a-half hours.
The man, whose first name is Richmond, smiled as he was pulled free but did not speak, our correspondent says.
A French rescue worker, Lt Col Arnaud, described the man's survival as "a miracle".
He said rescuers - who had been alerted by the man's relatives - had managed to get water to him while they worked to dig him out.
He said the man must have had access to some water in the past 11 days and had probably been helped by the fact that the 5-6m (16-20ft) of debris above him was largely wood, rather than concrete.
Lt Col Arnaud said the man had told his rescuers another four people were trapped with him but that they had stopped moving a couple of days ago.
Rescuers are now searching for any other signs of life.
Two people, an 84-year-old woman and a 21-year-old man, were pulled alive from the rubble in Port-au-Prince on Friday.
The woman, who was found in the wreckage of her home seriously injured and severely dehydrated, was taken to the main city hospital for treatment.
The 21-year-old man, Emmannuel Buso, was rescued by an Israeli search team and is said to be in a stable condition.
Speaking from his hospital bed, he described how he had had no food, and had drunk his own urine to keep thirst at bay.
Sources: MSNBC, BBC News, The Daily Beast, News of the World
A 5-year-old boy was pulled alive from a collapsed home Wednesday, eight days after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake devastated Haiti.
The boy's mother was killed, and his father is missing. It was unclear whether the boy, named Monley, had access to food and water, but doctors attributed his survival to resilience and the strength of his young body.
The boy was taken to a hospital. Doctors said he had no broken bones but was suffering from severe dehydration.
The Haitian government said it has recovered 72,000 bodies since last week's earthquake.
However, the Pan American Health Organization, which is coordinating the health-sector response, has offered a preliminary estimate of 200,000 dead.
Three other quakes in the last 100 years have had greater death tolls: one in China in 1920 that killed an estimated 200,000 or more, another there in 1976 that left 255,000 people dead and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, which caused about 228,000 deaths, the USGS said.
Meanwhile, a 5.9-magnitude aftershock rocked Haiti on Wednesday morning just as much-needed medical aid via a U.S. Navy ship reached the country.
The U.S. Geological Survey initially said the aftershock had a magnitude of 6.1, but downgraded it later.
The aftershock was the strongest to hit Haiti since the January 12 earthquake, the USGS said. The quake last week was 40 times stronger than Wednesday's aftershock, but the latest still rattled people.
Patients at a hospital near Haiti's airport in Port-au-Prince immediately started praying as the ground shook like a ship rocking back and forth. They asked for forgiveness and protection, a nurse said.
At least one injury was reported in the moments after the tremor struck at 6:03 a.m. There were no immediate reports of deaths or damage.
The aftershock was about 6.2 miles deep, with an epicenter about 35 miles (60 kilometers) west-southwest of Port-au-Prince, the USGS said.
One nonprofit organization, Save the Children, said its staff "heard already weakened structures collapsing" as a result of the aftershock.
Three million Haitians -- a third of the population -- remained in need of food, water, shelter and medical assistance, the United Nations estimated.
Some were elderly patients housed at Port-au-Prince's municipal nursing home. Patients -- many suffering from terminal illnesses or dementia -- were moved outside after the structure was destroyed and six people killed.
One doctor -- a volunteer who showed up Tuesday -- was treating them.
There are scenes of "madness" in some parts of Port-au-Prince, CNN's Ivan Watson reported from near the capital's port.
People had gathered, desperate to catch a boat to another part of the country, though there was no certainty that such vessels were coming.
Families were rowing out to sea in small, overloaded boats -- carrying up to 25 people -- to be first in line if a ferry did arrive, Watson said.
But relief workers were making strides in the arduous effort of getting aid to victims, officials said Wednesday.
"Every day we reach out further," said Lt. Gen. P.K. Keen, deputy commander of the U.S. military's Southern Command. "We are moving in the right direction."
The U.S. military said Wednesday that it plans to send an additional 4,000 sailors and Marines to Haiti.
About 11,000 U.S. service members already were in Haiti or aboard ships off the coast. The additional troops will bring to 15,000 the number of U.S. service members in or near Haiti.
The sailors and Marines are from the Nassau Amphibious Ready Group and 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, the military said. It was not immediately clear when they would arrive.
The U.S. military has delivered 200,000 bottles of water and more than 600,000 rations to Haitians, Keen said.
John Holmes, U.N. emergency relief coordinator, agreed that the situation is slowly improving.
"We are beginning to turn the corner. We are making progress," Holmes said. "But it's very frustrating that it takes so long to get as many supplies, doctors and hospitals that are needed."
The aid effort has frustrated some, with a few organizations charging that bottlenecks at the airport and mismanagement in other areas has hampered efforts to get help to the 2 million residents in Port-au-Prince who need it.
The U.S. hospital ship USNS Comfort arrived off Haiti on Wednesday, giving a boost to overloaded hospitals and clinics. The seagoing, 1,000-bed hospital carries 40 doctors, including 13 surgeons, and enough medical supplies to operate for 60 days.
Capt. Andy Johnson, the ship's medical operations director, said the ship expects to handle a minimum of 100 patients a day, the vast majority of them with orthopedic injuries suffered in collapsed buildings.
The first two patients taken on board, flown to the ship before it reached Haitian waters, were a 6-year-old boy with a crushed pelvis and 20-year-old man with a broken skull and possibly fractured cervical vertebrae. Cmdr. Tim Donahue, the ship's lead surgeon, said many of the staff have experience treating severe injuries among veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"They're not shocked by what they're seeing," Donahue said. "It's very routine for them."
The Comfort's medical staff of nearly 550 will be joined by another 350 people once the ship reaches Haiti, according to the U.S. Southern Command.
The death toll is expected to increase.
Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told CNN's Christiane Amanpour that at least 72,000 bodies had been recovered, not including the unknown number buried by families or collected by the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti.
It was unclear how many of the dead had been identified before burial and how many of those burials occurred in mass graves.
At least 28 Americans were confirmed dead, the U.S. State Department said Tuesday.
Outside Haiti, people have contributed more than $220 million to major U.S. relief groups, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, a newspaper covering nonprofit organizations.
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 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.
"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.
A U.S.-led rescue effort brought ships, mobile hospitals and food to Haiti after the prime minister said the earthquake two days ago that devastated Port- au-Prince may have killed more than 100,000 people.
The United Nations and international aid groups said time is running out to save thousands of people trapped beneath collapsed buildings in the capital by the country’s worst quake in more than a century. President Rene Preval said his nation, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest, has been “destroyed.”
“People buried under the rubble are still alive,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said yesterday. “We must save as many as possible. The most urgent need is for emergency search and rescue teams.”
In Port-au-Prince, a city of about 2 million, bodies are heaped along streets and corpses of small children piled outside schools as flies begin to gather, the Associated Press reported. The UN said clean water is lacking and hotels, hospitals and the national penitentiary suffered extensive damage, as did the offices of UN peacekeeping forces and the presidential palace.
“I cannot live in the palace, I cannot live in my own house,” Preval told CNN in an interview at the airport. “The two collapsed.”
Haiti’s population of 9.6 million has a per capita income of about $560, with 54 percent of Haitians living on less than $1 a day and 78 percent on less than $2 daily, according to the World Bank. The gross domestic product was $7 billion in 2008. The country is still recovering from four tropical storms or hurricanes that killed at least 800 people in 2008.
Food, Shelter
“The first needs are for food, shelter and water, the absolute basics,” said David Humphries, a spokesman in Washington for CHF International, an aid group with 170 members in Haiti and a four-year budget of $104 million from the United States Agency for International Development.
USAID said in a statement today it’s sending 14,550 tons of food aid to Haiti to feed 1.2 million people for two weeks.
A U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, search and rescue squads from Miami and Virginia, and cell phone repair engineers are making their way to Haiti after President Barack Obama ordered a “swift, coordinated” relief effort.
The U.S. military is “very seriously” looking at sending troops to support UN and Haitian forces to maintain order in the Caribbean nation, General Douglas Fraser, head of the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, told reporters at the State Department in Washington.
Rescue Efforts
Rescue efforts are still unfolding and Fraser said it may take days for large quantities of supplies to reach survivors. Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said that “well over” 100,000 people may have died in the magnitude 7.0 temblor centered about 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the capital. The U.S. Geological Survey said on its Web site the quake was the “most violent” in Haiti in more than 100 years.
Florian Westphal, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, said reliable figures on the number of casualties aren’t yet available.
“We are unfortunately nowhere in a position to give a reliable estimate” on the number of dead and injured, Westphal said in a telephone interview today. “About 3 million inhabitants are very much affected, but the focus now is on the capital.”
Port Damaged
A U.S. Coast Guard inspection found significant quake damage to piers at Port-au-Prince port that may limit the flow of relief supplies brought by sea in the next few days, State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley told reporters in Washington.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates called off a trip to Asia to help coordinate relief efforts in Washington.
French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said today in Paris that three planes with military police and first aid have already arrived in Haiti and a fourth is on its way.
“A city has sunk and the toll is terrible,” Fillon said.
Germany’s Red Cross is airlifting a field hospital with doctors and nurses to Haiti tomorrow, Peter Ossowski, head of Red Cross logistics in Berlin, said in an N24 television interview. The tent facility will have space for 200 patients.
The U.K. has sent 64 fire fighters and eight search and rescue specialists to Haiti. The teams, which landed in Haiti this morning, are equipped with heavy lifting gear and search and rescue dogs, U.K. International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander told the BBC today. The U.K. will give $10 million to relief efforts, the government said today in London.
Economic Damage
Economic damage may be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, according to estimates from Eqecat Inc., an Oakland, California-based company that builds financial risk models to help insurers prepare for catastrophes. Eqecat estimated that as many as 2 million people may be affected by the earthquake and aftershocks.
Citigroup Inc., the U.S. bank that operates in more than 100 countries, said its three-story office building in Port-au- Prince collapsed. The bank is trying to account for 44 people who worked in the building, said Liliana Mejia, a spokeswoman for the New York-based bank. Gladys Coupet, Citigroup’s top executive in Haiti, broke her leg, Mejia said.
Montreal-based Gildan Activewear Inc., the largest T-shirt maker in North America, said in a statement distributed by Marketwire that one of its three contract facilities in Haiti suffered “substantial damage.”
U.S. Citizens
Search and Rescue squads from Fairfax County, Virginia, and Los Angeles have been sent to Haiti aboard U.S. military flights, Crowley said. Crowley said the U.S. Embassy is checking on the status of the estimated 45,000 U.S. citizens on the island, while it works to help direct relief efforts.
The headquarters of the UN’s 9,000-person security mission in Haiti collapsed, hampering efforts to coordinate international aid. The UN said 16 peacekeepers were confirmed dead and 56 were injured. Another 150 are unaccounted for.
The U.S. government is sending two, 72-man search and rescue teams with dogs, said Rajiv Shah, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, whom Obama assigned to coordinate the U.S. relief effort.
Four U.S. Coast Guard cutters are already approaching Haiti and the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson is scheduled to arrive today.
Florida’s Miami-Dade County will send a 75-member Search and Rescue team, Mayor Carlos Alvarez said at a news conference.
Mobilizing
“They’re mobilizing and will be ready to leave when they’re called,” he said. Some 34,000 people live in Miami’s Little Haiti district, according to the city’s Web site.
The U.S. Navy’s Military Sealift Command, which operates the hospital ship Comfort, docked in Baltimore, was ordered to prepare to sail if needed, said Trish Larsen, a spokeswoman for the command in Washington. The ship could leave port in about five days, she said.
The Comfort can carry 650 medical professionals. It provided support in New York City after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, according to its Web site.
Haitian native and "Heroes" cast member Jimmy Jean-Louis was searching for his elderly parents in Haiti on Wednesday afternoon after a powerful earthquake struck the nation. Jean-Louis learned that a house he had grown up in collapsed, killing several of his relatives.
"I have not slept yet. The second house that I grew up in was down, and some relatives have died, from what I have been told," Jean-Louis said Wednesday. "I haven't been able to reach my parents. I have heard that they are OK, but I do not know what is going on around them."
Jean-Louis was born in Petionville, Haiti, where he grew up without electricity or running water. He moved to Paris, France, when he was 12 to pursue a modeling career and supported his parents by sending money home since he started acting nearly 20 years ago.
He is the founder of Hollywood Unites for Haiti, a Non-profit organization whose original mission was to provide sports and cultural education to underprivileged youth on the island. The group is mobilizing for disaster relief after a magnitude-7 earthquake struck Tuesday.
The actor heard about the quake moments after the news broke. For several hours, he was unable to get in touch with anyone on the ground in Haiti. Late Tuesday, he reached a friend who is the local director of Hollywood Unites for Haiti.
"He was stuck in the chaos, and he was supposed to give me complete details about what was going on on the ground and with my family, but all he could say was that the house was down and that some people from the house died," Jean-Louis said. "I'm trying everyone on their cell phones and on their house phones, my parents' friends and the people in their neighborhood, and I have been unable to speak with one person who is close to them."
Jean-Louis, who is best known as "The Haitian" on the NBC series "Heroes," returned from Haiti only a couple of weeks ago after spending the holidays with his parents. He was planning to return this month but will now be traveling much sooner to provide relief aid.
"I am going to try to get in, but I am going to try to understand the situation first to see how I can best help," Jean-Louis said. "The plan is to at some point visit, and right now, I am trying to be as productive as I can be here."
Jean-Louis and Hollywood Unites for Haiti are encouraging people looking to help to send money instead of goods at the moment.
"People should understand that sending donations of items and goods will be difficult right now because we will be bombarded and have no way to distribute them," Jean-Louis said.
"I don't think people have any idea how terrible this is because of the circumstances on the ground in Haiti and the lack of the infrastructure. There are no roads, and it is going to be extremely difficult for help to reach people."
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