Amid rubble and impassable roads, Haiti aid workers look for ways to distribute food, supplies

Aid groups struggle to get food, water to Haitians

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Hundreds of U.S. paratroopers touched down in shattered Port-au-Prince overnight as U.N. and other aid organizations struggled Friday to get food and water to stricken millions. Fears spread of unrest among the Haitian people in their fourth day of desperation.

Hard-pressed government workers, meanwhile, were burying thousands of bodies in mass graves. The Red Cross estimates 45,000 to 50,000 people were killed in Tuesday’s cataclysmic earthquake.

More and more, the focus fell on the daunting challenge of getting aid to survivors. United Nations peacekeepers patrolling the capital said people’s anger was rising that aid hasn’t been distributed quickly, and warned aid convoys to add security to guard against looting.

Ordinary Haitians sensed the potential for an explosion of lawlessness. “We’re worried that people will get a little uneasy,” said attendant Jean Reynol, 37, explaining his gas station was ready to close immediately if violence breaks out.

“People who have not been eating or drinking for almost 50 hours and are already in a very poor situation,” U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said in Geneva. “If they see a truck with something, or if they see a supermarket which has collapsed, they just rush to get something to eat.”

The quake’s destruction of Port-au-Prince’s main prison complicated the security situation. International Red Cross spokesman Marcal Izard said some 4,000 prisoners had escaped and were freely roaming the streets.

“They obviously took advantage of this disaster,” Izard said.

But Byrs said peacekeepers were maintaining security despite the challenges. “It’s tense but they can cope,” she said.

The U.N. World Food Program said post-quake looting of its food supplies long stored in Port-au-Prince appears to have been limited, contrary to an earlier report Friday. It said it would start handing out 6,000 tons of food aid recovered from a damaged warehouse in the city’s Cite Soleil slum.

A spokeswoman for the Rome-based agency, Emilia Casella, said the WFP was preparing shipments of enough ready-to-eat meals to feed 2 million Haitians for a month. She noted that regular food stores in the city had been emptied by looters.

More than 300 troops of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division arrived at the Port au Prince airport overnight and others have arrived in nearby waters on the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, deputy commander of the U.S. Southern Command, told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“We have much more support on the way. Our priority is getting relief out to the needy people,” he said.

About 5,500 U.S. soldiers and Marines are expected to be in Haiti by Monday. Their efforts will include providing security, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

Hundreds of bodies were stacked outside the city morgue, and limbs of the dead protruded from the rubble of crushed schools and homes. A few workers were able to free people who had been trapped under the rubble for days, including a New Jersey woman, Sarla Chand, 65, of Teaneck, freed by French firefighters Thursday from the collapsed Montana Hotel. But others attended to the grim task of using bulldozers to transport loads of bodies.

Haitian President Rene Preval told The Miami Herald that over a 20-hour period government crews had removed 7,000 corpses from the streets and morgues and buried them in mass graves.

For the long-suffering people of Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation, shock was giving way to despair.

“We need food. The people are suffering. My neighbors and friends are suffering,” said Sylvain Angerlotte, 22. “We don’t have money. We don’t have nothing to eat. We need pure water.”

From Europe, Asia and the Americas, more than 20 governments, the U.N. and private aid groups were sending planeloads of high-energy biscuits and other food, tons of water, tents, blankets, water-purification gear, heavy equipment for removing debris, helicopters and other transport. Hundreds of search-and-rescue, medical and other specialists also headed to Haiti.

The WFP began organizing distribution centers for food and water Thursday, said Kim Bolduc, acting chief of the large U.N. mission in Haiti. She said that “the risk of having social unrest very soon” made it important to move quickly.

Governments and government agencies have pledged about $400 million worth of aid, including $100 million from the United States.

But the global helping hand was slowed by a damaged seaport and an airport that turned away civilian aid planes for eight hours Thursday because of a lack of space and fuel.

Aid workers have been blocked by debris on inadequate roads and by survivors gathered in the open out of fear of aftershocks from Tuesday’s 7.0-magnitude quake and re-entering unstable buildings.

“The physical destruction is so great that physically getting from point A to B with the supplies is not an easy task,” Casella, the WFP spokeswoman in Geneva, said at a news conference.

Across the sprawling, hilly city, people milled about in open areas, hopeful for help, sometimes setting up camps amid piles of salvaged goods, including food scavenged from the rubble.

Small groups could be seen burying dead by roadsides. Other dust-covered bodies were dragged down streets, toward hospitals where relatives hoped to leave them. Countless dead remained unburied. Outside one pharmacy, the body of a woman was covered by a sheet, a small bundle atop her, a tiny foot poking from its covering.

Aid worker Fevil Dubien said some people were almost fighting over the water he distributed from a truck in a northern Port-au-Prince neighborhood.

Elsewhere, about 50 Haitians yearning for food and water rushed toward two employees wearing “Food For The Poor” T-shirts as they entered the international agency’s damaged building.

“We heard a commotion at the door, knocking at it, trying to get in,” said project manager Liony Batista. “‘What’s going on? Are you giving us some food?’ We said, ‘Uh-oh.’ You never know when people are going over the edge.”

Batista said he and others tried to calm the crowd, which eventually dispersed after being told food hadn’t yet arrived.

“We’re not trying to run away from what we do,” Batista said, adding that coordinating aid has been a challenge. “People looked desperate, people looked hungry, people looked lost.”

Engineers from the U.N. mission have begun clearing some main roads, and law-and-order duties have fallen completely to its 3,000 international troops and police.

David Wimhurst, spokesman for the U.N. peacekeeping mission, said Haitian police “are not visible at all,” no doubt because many had to deal with lost homes and family members. The first U.S. military units to arrive took on a coordinating role at the airport.

Batista, the Food For The Poor project manager, went back to the Dominican Republic late Thursday and awaited the arrival of 100 shipping containers loaded with rice, canned goods and building supplies.

“I don’t think that a word has been invented for what is happening in Haiti,” he said. “It is total disaster.”

Associated Press contributors to this story: Mike Melia, Jennifer Kay and Gregory Bull in Port-au-Prince; Bradley S. Klapper in Geneva; Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations; Tales Azzoni in Sao Paulo, Brazil; Danica Coto and David McFadden in San Juan, Puerto Rico; Matthew Lee and Pauline Jelinek in Washington.