SECURITY SITUATION:THOUSANDS OF people left hurt or homeless were begging for food, water and medical assistance yesterday as the world rushed to deliver aid to survivors before their despair turned to anger.
We have lost everything. We are waiting for death. We have nothing to eat, nowhere to live. We have had no help. No one has come to see us, said quake victim Andres Rosario, speaking at an improvised camp set up by survivors at a rubbish dump in Port-au-Prince.
No one is helping us. Please bring us water or people will die soon, said another resident Renelde Lamarque, who has opened his home yard to about 500 quake victims in the devastated Fort National neighbourhood.
Raggedly-dressed survivors held out their arms to foreign reporters in the streets, begging for food and water.
Amid fears that local anger and frustration over delays in receiving help could explode into violence, US defence secretary Robert Gates said that aside from some scavenging for supplies and minor looting the security situation on the ground in Haiti remained “pretty good”.
Police have all but vanished from the streets, and although some Brazilian UN peacekeepers were patrolling yesterday, there have been reports of sporadic scavenging and some looting.
At one destroyed supermarket scores of people swarmed over the rubble to try to reach the food underneath. Just outside Cité Soleil slum, desperate people crowded around a burst water pipe jostling to drink from the pipe or fill up buckets.
Some survivors, angry over the delay in getting aid, build roadblocks with corpses on Thursday in one part of the city.
Relief workers said some aid was trickling through to people but in haphazard fashion. – (Reuters)