The first planeloads of emergency food and medicines were expected in Haiti today, three days after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled into exile and US Marines landed to restore calm after a month-long revolt.
As aid agencies warned that already dire humanitarian needs in the poorest country of the Americas now verged on a crisis, missionaries and aid workers who had fled or gone to ground to escape fighting prepared to ramp up their relief efforts.
"It's not an exaggeration to say (the humanitarian situation) has to be horrendous," said Mr Ken Boodhoo, an international relations expert at Florida International University, who also runs an aid agency, Whole Man Ministries.
Warehouses that stored emergency food for the UN's World Food Programme before the rebels took over a swath of Haiti's north were looted in the mayhem as ill-equipped police were driven out by armed gangs, demobilized soldiers and former militia leaders.
That food would have fed hundreds of thousands in a country where a third of the 8 million population suffers from chronic malnutrition, the majority scrapes out a subsistence living from barren soil and incomes average just a dollar a day.
International charity Oxfam said conditions were particularly grave in Port de Paix, in the remote northwest, where at least 80,000 people were threatened by disease because they had no access to clean water.