World pledges aid as rescue teams find many alive

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Sunday

World leaders have stepped up to pledge aid to rebuild a devastated Haiti, but on the streets of its wrecked capital quake survivors were still waiting on Sunday for the basics: food, water and medicine.

Four days after a massive quake killed up to 200,000 people international rescue teams were still finding people alive under the rubble of collapsed buildings in Port-au-Prince.

Hundreds of thousands of hungry Haitians were desperately waiting for help, but logistical logjams kept major relief from reaching most victims, many of them sheltering in makeshift camps on streets strewn with debris and decomposing bodies.

In the widespread absence of authority, looters swarmed over collapsed stores on the city’s shattered main commercial boulevard, carrying off T-shirts, bags, toys and anything else they could find.

Fighting broke out between groups of looters carrying knives, ice-picks, hammers and rocks.
Suitcases on their heads

Many Haitians streamed out of the city on foot with suitcases on their heads or jammed in cars to find food and shelter in the countryside, and flee aftershocks and violence.

Many others crowded the airport hoping to get on planes that left packed with Haitians.

President Barack Obama promised help as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flew to Haiti, where the shell-shocked government gave the United States control over the congested main airport to guide aid flights from around the world.

“We’re moving forward with one of the largest relief efforts in our history to save lives and deliver relief that averts an even larger catastrophe,” said Mr Obama, flanked at the White House by predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who will lead a charity drive to help Haiti.

Helicopters swooped

There were jostling scrums for food and water as US military helicopters swooped down to throw out boxes of water bottles and rations.

“The distribution is totally disorganised. They are not identifying the people who need the water. The sick and the old have no chance,” said Estime Pierre Deny, standing at the back of a crowd looking for water with his empty plastic container.

Dramatising the need to keep up rescue efforts, a Russian team pulled out two Haitian girls still alive — 9-year-old Olon Remi and 11-year-old Senviol Ovri — from the ruins of a house on Saturday.

US rescuers worked through the night to dig out survivors from one collapsed supermarket where as many as 100 people could have been trapped inside.

They were about to give up, when they were told a supermarket cashier had managed to call someone in Miami to say she was still alive inside.

(Reuters)