Apocalypse in the streets

[FarCenter]

MARC LACEY, PORT-AU-PRINCE
January 17, 2010
http://www.theage.com.au/world/apocalypse-in-the-streets-20100116-mdcp.html?autostart=1

AS TENSION rose in the battered Haitian capital, relief workers scrambled to deliver desperately needed food, water and medical care, recover survivors still trapped in the rubble and collect thousands of decaying bodies.

An immense relief operation was under way, with cargo planes and military helicopters buzzing over the crowded airport.

But four days after the earthquake struck, not nearly enough search and rescue teams or emergency supplies could make it here. The United Nations said it had fed 8000 people, while 2 million to 3 million remained in dire need.

Patience was wearing thin, and reports of looting increased, as another day went by with no power and limited fresh water.

''For the moment, this is anarchy,'' said Adolphe Reynald, an aide to the mayor of Port-au-Prince, as he supervised a makeshift first-aid centre that was registering long lines of injured people but had no medicine to treat them. ''There's nothing we can do. We're out here to show that we care.''

The United Nations said 9000 people had been buried in mass graves; collecting bodies had become one of the few ways to earn money. ''They pay me $100 a day,'' Valencia Joseph, 32, said on Friday, as he was called to tug a body free of wires. ''We must have picked up 2000 bodies. And there's more.''

Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 people may have died, said Dr John Andrus, deputy director of the Pan American Health Organisation: ''We really do not know the number.''

Last Tuesday's quake devastated much of Haiti's already inadequate infrastructure, destroying a third of the buildings in the capital, and its water and sewerage systems. The airport cannot handle the flood of relief arriving, and the port was declared unusable. That has left aid workers short of food, water and medical supplies.

''There's a feeling of apocalypse in the streets,'' said Andre Davila, a co-ordinator with Brazilian aid group Viva Rio. ''The state doesn't exist any more.''

<SNIP>

Looting of houses and shops also increased yesterday, and anger boiled over in unpredictable ways: residents near the city's overfilled main cemetery stoned ambulance workers seeking to drop off more bodies.

Some people were bracing for the worst. Harold Marzouka, a Haitian-American businessman who was hustling his family on to a private jet to Miami, said he feared that hunger and desperation might prompt an explosion of violence.

''If aid doesn't start pouring in at a significant level, there will be serious consequences on the streets,'' he said. ''People are in the shocked and frightened phase. But the next phase will be survival.''

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[cliffordu]

1. That article is dated tomorrow.

??

Early edition.

[FarCenter]

2. Australian newspaper, it is tomorrow there

[cliffordu]

4. D'oh.

MMMMMMM Hamburgers....

(Insert Homer Simpson here)

[flvegan]

3. It's Sunday in Australia.

[truedelphi]

5. I was watching the Spanish language station.

Unlike the main channels here, that seem to promote the notion that since our nation is so caring, vast resources will stop anything bad from occurring, the Spanish network honed in on images of dead and rotting bodies in the fallen houses, and then the cameras would sweep across a vast panorama, implying that the dead bodies in the houses we had just viewed were indeed all across the
many affected neighborhoods.

This is the setting for cholera, typhoid and worse. An act of God, and with so many systems in failure mode there, I am not sure what can be done to stop this.