SCENE:SOME WERE left beside the rubble, others were shrouded under sheets and lined up in rows, others were packed and stacked in pick-up trucks: there was no escaping the dead of Port-au-Prince, writes RORY CARROLL
The general hospital, its services all but collapsed, became host to a growing army of corpses. Carried, dragged and wheeled there, their ranks swelled by the hour, from dozens to hundreds to over a thousand. Burial was a task for another day while there were still living souls to be dug out from the heaps of smashed concrete.
It was day three in Haiti’s capital and if anything, the horror seemed to be worsening. At the Ecole Normale Delmas, emergency teams extracted the bodies of teenage schoolgirls. Their faces were smashed.
Laura Bickle, an orphanage worker, said the parks were filled with people with no homes. “They are pulling people out of the rubble . . . blood running in the gutter like water.”
Haiti’s Red Cross said the death toll could be between 45,000 and 50,000, with a further three million hurt or homeless.
Seemingly everywhere, limbs covered in ash and dust poked from the rubble. In places there were moans and muffled cries beneath the ruins, spurring frantic efforts to dig people out with bare hands and improvised tools. There were fleeting glimpses of joy – an Estonian UN worker freed from rubble clenched his fist in celebration – but they did not change what became increasingly, brutally clear: Port-au-Prince was a tomb.
“It’s the worst I’ve ever seen,” said the Salvation Army’s director of disaster services in Haiti, Bob Poff. “It’s so much devastation in a concentrated area. It’s going to take days or weeks to dig out.”
CNN’s medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta gave the bleakest assessment: “What I have seen here in Haiti, I have never seen before. While I hate to say this, it seems somewhat hopeless.”
Emergency experts said finding survivors under the rubble was a race against time – that the vast majority would perish within three days – in which case that race will soon be lost. A few police were seen loading bodies into a van but most officers were absent, presumably dead, injured or trying to take care of their own families.
With communication networks still mostly down, Twitter once again became a resource for those desperately seeking news of loved ones. From _at_LadyDior47: “do you know what neighborhood rue l’enterrement is in? My aunt owns a store there. I cannot get in contact with her.”
Clinics and hospitals – those still standing – were crammed. Some had feet and arms twisted at unnatural angles, others had homemade bandages turning crimson, dripping blood.
The Red Cross said it was overwhelmed and out of medicine and body bags.
Olivier Bernard, head of Medecins du Monde, said aid had to arrive by last night. “To save lives, surgery must be available ideally within the first 48 hours.”
Patients with “severe traumas, head wounds, crushed limbs” poured into Medecins Sans Frontieres’s temporary structures but the agency was only able to offer them basic medical care, spokesman Paul McPhun said.
“The smell is nauseating. Bodies lie outside on the lawn, among them lie the injured and inside the screams and whimpers of those in pain echo down the corridors.”
Almost at every turn, a nightmarish scene. A dead abandoned baby; a man with stumps for legs; a woman on an unfolded cardboard box, blood pooling beneath.
In the Hotel Villa Creole, furniture was used as patient trolleys and hotel guests with no medical training tended wounded who had come in from the street.
“These people have nowhere else to go,” Anne Wanlund, an office worker from Washington DC said as she picked pieces of concrete out of a woman’s head wound.
“Wherever they think there are supplies, any chance of getting help, they are going to take it.”
In the lobby were children with heads wrapped in blood-soaked gauze. Juidthe Jacques, who brought her mother Marguerite in with a broken knee, fought back tears. “Where are the doctors? We expected doctors.”
Any semblance of the state had collapsed but the city, which in normal times is a byword for lawlessness, displayed solidarity.
There were warnings though that isolated cases of shooting and looting could spread unless help arrived soon. “The streets are now Haiti’s living room and bedroom,” said Richard Morse, the manager of the Hotel Oloffson. “Money, food, drinks, supplies, rotting bodies, frustration, impatience, despair will all become a problem. The devastation is so widespread that the folks who should be helping are probably taking care of their own issues.”
Transport aircraft laden with supplies and emergency teams did land at the airport, but doctors worried that dehydration and disease may outpace the aid effort. “Money is worth nothing now, water is the currency,” said one aid worker.
A power blackout, scant water and medicine and decomposing corpses were a lethal cocktail, Peter Hotez, head of the department of microbiology at George Washington University, told CNN. “ It is already a fragile infrastructure with high rates of infectious and neglected tropical disease. Now there are potential breakdowns in sanitation, clean water, housing and subsequent crowding. That’s a terrible mix.” – (Guardian service)