Quake Survivors Cry for Help as Aftershocks Rattle Haiti

Hundreds of thousands of earthquake refugees lay sprawled in Haiti's streets Thursday – rich and poor singing hymns or sobbing, survivors sleeping alongside the dead – afraid to take shelter under the odd building left standing as aftershocks rumbled the ground beneath them.

Two days after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake shook apart most of Haiti's infrastructure, the full scale of destruction was only beginning to emerge. The U.N. mission there described damage to the capital Port-au-Prince as "massive and broad," with the national cathedral, presidential palace and hundreds of thousands of homes all destroyed. "Electricity supplies have been interrupted. Water is in short supply," the U.N. said in a statement. "Haitian services are visibly unable to cope."

The country's prime minister has said the death toll could top 100,000. The Red Cross says three million people -- a third of the entire population -- need help.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday she fears "tens of thousands" are dead, and vowed to do everything possible to help Haiti overcome its "cycle of hope and despair." She appeared on several morning news shows after cutting short a trip to Pacific nations to return to Washington and help with relief efforts.

"This is a devastating catastrophe... We have some of the best people in the world from the United States down there and we're just going to do everything we can to be helpful," Clinton said. Some 45,000 Americans in Haiti are among those affected by the quake, she said. President Barack Obama, who a day earlier announced a massive relief effort, planned another public statement from the White House later Thursday.



U.S. military planes carrying the first batch of aid touched down in Haiti overnight, and troops from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division were expected later Thursday. Emergency stockpiles have already run out.

British rescue workers flew to the Dominican Republic and were heading toward Haiti with sophisticated equipment to detect sounds of life under wreckage. A 60-member Chinese search-and-rescue team with sniffer dogs also arrived Thursday.

Haitian Red Cross spokesman Pericles Jean-Baptiste said his organization -- accustomed to working in a nation blighted by poverty, war and natural disasters -- was overwhelmed and out of medicine. "There are too many people who need help," he told Reuters. "We lack equipment, we lack body bags."

"This is much worse than a hurricane," said doctor's assistant Jimitre Coquillon. "There's no water. There's nothing. Thirsty people are going to die," he told The Associated Press as he worked at a triage center in a hotel parking lot.


The first airlifts carried food and medical supplies, while later flights would bring heavy machinery to begin clearing debris. But before they arrived, Haitians used trowels and bare hands to sift through cement chunks in hopes of freeing victims whose faint calls were audible under the wreckage.

With phone lines severed, Haitians sent macabre pleas for help from wireless handheld devices, in some cases literally from under the rubble.

"Haiti is still shaking!! HELP!!" read one appeal from Carel Pedre, a popular Port-au-Prince radio DJ, on the micro-blogging site Twitter. "The last aftershock was short but there are thousands of people homeless and helpless on the streets," he wrote.

Pedre used Twitter to contact friends and family. "Any news from the Magik9/Canal11 building? Any news from Gerald and Bernie?" he wrote. "They are safe," came the response in another tweet.

But such relief was rare Thursday in Haiti, with most people still not knowing whether loved ones were alive.

A U.N. worker with access to a satellite phone made a distraught call to relatives in New Zealand overnight to say her husband and three young daughters were missing and she was struggling to find help amid the chaos, according to her hometown newspaper in New Zealand, The Nelson Mail. Later the woman, Emily Sanson-Rejouis, called back to say one of her daughters was found alive under the dead body of her father, but the couple's two other children remain missing.

As the sun rose Thursday over Haiti's capital, survivors walked gingerly over bodies covered in blankets on sidewalks. It was difficult to tell the dead from the living. Prayers and chants went up through the crowd. People crafted homemade gurneys out of wheelbarrows and mattresses to transport the injured. But to where? Most of the city's hospitals were damaged, and without electricity or staff.

Laura Bickle, an American working at an orphanage in Port-au-Prince, described the scene before her: "All the parks are filled with people - they either have no home to go to or they are too scared to go home," she told BBC Radio. "They are pulling people out of the rubble, literally, blood running in the gutter like water."

The epicenter of Tuesday's quake was only 10 miles from Port-au-Prince, which is home to about four million people. Aftershocks continued Thursday, some as powerful as 5.9-magnitude.

Relief efforts were truly global in scale. China sent 10 tons of tents and medical equipment, the European Commission pledged $4.37 million in aid and Israel is sending an elite army rescue unit of engineers and doctors, AP reported.

The coordinator of U.K. rescue work in Haiti, Mike Thomas, told the BBC his priority was to identify places where people might still be alive under the rubble. "We're hoping we can get our dogs there quickly, they'll be invaluable in helping target those areas," he said.

Another Twitter user, identified as RAMhaiti wrote this message early Thursday from somewhere in the chaos of Port-au-Prince: "St Gerard Church and the school behind it are destroyed. People are alive in the rubble. I look at the sky, see the stars, and it's as if nothing was wrong. The singing, the praying and the sirens bring me back to reality."