The staggering scope of Haiti’s nightmare came into sharper focus today as rescuers estimated there were 1.5 million people left homeless by last week's earthquake that left some 200,000 dead.
Injured survivors were still dying in the streets and looters fighting each other in the rubble. Doctors worried disease would be the next big challenge for the tens of thousands left injured and homeless a week ago.
Medical teams pouring in to set up mobile hospitals said they were already overwhelmed by the casualties and warned of the immediate threats of tetanus and gangrene as well as the spread of measles, meningitis and other infections.
The world pledged more money, food, medicine and police. Some 2,000 US Marines steamed into nearby waters. And ex-president Bill Clinton, special UN envoy, flew in to offer support. Six days after the earthquake struck, search teams still pulled buried survivors from the ruins.
But hour by hour the unmet needs of hundreds of thousands grew.
Overwhelmed surgeons appealed for anaesthetics, scalpels, saws for cutting off crushed limbs. Uncounted thousands of survivors sought to cram onto buses headed out of town. In downtown streets, others begged for basics.
“Have we been abandoned? Where is the food?” shouted one man.
The UN World Food Program (WFP) said it expected to boost operations from feeding 67,000 people on Sunday to 97,000 yesterday. But it needs 100 million prepared meals over the next 30 days, and it appealed for more government donations.
“I know that aid cannot come soon enough,” UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said in New York after returning from Haiti. “Unplug the bottlenecks,” he urged.
The UN Security Council unanimously agreed today to temporarily increase the number of UN troops and police in Haiti by 3,500 to help maintain security and support earthquake relief efforts.
The military escorts would ensure desperately-needed food and water was distributed to victims of the humanitarian tragedy without any violence, the UN said.
The UN currently has 7,000 military peacekeepers and 2,100 international police in Haiti.
In one step to reassure frustrated aid groups, the US military agreed to give aid deliveries priority over military flights at the now-US-run airport. The Americans’ handling of civilian flights had angered some humanitarian officials.
Looting and violence flared again as hundreds clambered over the broken walls of shops to grab anything they could - including toothpaste, now valuable for lining nostrils against the stench of Port-au-Prince’s dead. Police fired into the air as young men fought each other over rum and beer with broken bottles and machetes.
Police Chief Mario Andersol said he can muster only 2,000 officers in the capital, down from 4,500 before the quake, and they "are not trained to deal with this kind of situation."
European Commission analysts estimate the quake injured 250,000 and made 1.5 million homeless, and many are exasperated by the delays in getting aid.
"I simply don't understand what is taking the foreigners so long," said Raymond Saintfort, a pharmacist who brought two suitcases of aspirin and antiseptics to survivors in the ruins of a nursing home.
Hard-pressed medical teams sometimes had to take time away from quake victims to deal with gunshot wounds, said Loris de Filippi of Doctors Without Borders.
In the Montrissant neighbourhood, Red Cross doctors working in shipping containers and saying they “cannot cope” lost 50 patients over two days, said international Red Cross spokesman Simon Schorno.
Amid the debris and the smoke of bodies being burned, dozens of international rescue teams dug on in search of buried survivors.
The latest casualty report, from the European Commission citing Haitian government figures, doubled previous estimates of the dead from the magnitude 7.0 quake, to approximately 200,000, with some 70,000 bodies recovered and trucked off to mass graves.
If accurate, that would make Haiti’s catastrophe about as deadly as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed an estimated 230,000 people in a dozen countries.
European Commission analysts estimate 250,000 were injured and 1.5 million were made homeless. Masses are living under plastic sheets in makeshift camps and in dust-covered automobiles, or had taken to the road seeking out relatives in the safer countryside.
The UN humanitarian chief, Sir John Holmes, said not all 15 planned UN food distribution points were up and running yet. “That’s a question of people, trucks, fuel, but the aid is scaling up very rapidly,” he said.
The priorities are clearing roads, ensuring security at UN distribution points, getting this city’s seaport working again and bringing in more trucks and helicopters.
US military officers hope to reopen Port-au-Prince's shattered seaport in two or three days, but are relying for now on airdrops to distribute food and water by helicopter.
A C-17 cargo plane, flying round-trip from Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina, air-dropped 14,000 packaged "meals ready to eat" and 14,000 water rations to quake survivors, the US military said.
The US Army's 82nd Airborne set up a base at the Petionville Club, organising orderly queues to distribute water bottles and meal packs to the 50,000 survivors who pitched tents on Haiti's only golf course. Exhausted soldiers slept on the tennis courts.
Fuel prices have doubled, and there were long queues outside gas stations, where cars, motorbikes and people with jerrycans have lined up. Haitian police stood guard at some.
Although a few street markets began selling vegetables, charcoal, chicken and pork, tens of thousands of survivors across the city were still clamouring for help.
Agencies