Haiti’s government has declared the search for survivors of the country’s devastating earthquake over, the United Nations said today.
The Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs said 132 people were pulled alive from the rubble by international search and rescue teams.
Humanitarian relief efforts are still being scaled up in Port-au-Prince, Jacmel, Leogane and other areas affected by the quake, spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said.
The decision comes the day after two people emerged from beneath the rubble of the stricken capital 10 days after the quake, temporarily reviving fading belief that others may have survived.
The rescues briefly punched through the grief shrouding legions of survivors as they streamed from the city’s desolation or found refuge in its hundreds of squalid, makeshift camps.
In the forecourt of the ruined Notre Dame cathedral in Port-au-Prince, a crowd of worshippers, priests and nuns gathered for the funeral of Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot and Vicar General Charles Benoit, both of whom died in the catastrophic earthquake that demolished swathes of the coastal capital.
"What we lost we can't get back. It is not the rich who have lost, or the poor, we are all together," said Leon Sejour, a seminarist who had traveled from the northern city of Cap Haitien for the funeral.
Far away, celebrities and artists made impassioned pleas for charitable donations during an internationally broadcast telethon last night.
“The Haitian people need our help,” said Hollywood star George Clooney, who helped organise the two-hour telecast. “They need to know that they are not alone. They need to know that we still care.”
The 7.0-magnitude quake killed an estimated 200,000 people, according to Haitian government figures cited by the European Commission.
Countless dead remained buried in thousands of collapsed and toppled buildings
in Port-au-Prince, while as many as 200,000 have fled the city of two million, the US Agency for International Development reported.
Scores of aid organisations, big and small, have stepped up deliveries of food, water, medical supplies and other aid to the homeless and other needy. But obstacles remained at every turn to getting help into people’s hands.
Amid the wreckage, rescuers were still looking for survivors yesterday.
The Israeli team which saved 21-year-old Emmannuel Buso said relatives approached asking for help. They pulled away the debris of a two-storey home and called out. To everyone’s surprise, Mr Buso responded.
Also yesterday, an 84-year-old woman was said by relatives to have been pulled from the wreckage of her home, according to doctors administering oxygen and intravenous fluids to her at the General Hospital. She was in a critical condition.
Rescuers said they were encouraged but all too aware that few trapped people can survive for that long.
“Statistically you can say that the chance of survival is very low,” said Fernando Alvarez Bravo, a representative in Mexico for rescue crews founded during the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, and still at work in Haiti yesterday. “But the hope it gives the population to recover and find their loved ones helps them to recover quickly. They don’t feel abandoned.”
The rescues came two days after many international search teams began packing up their gear and other aid groups remained to grapple with challenges of helping survivors.
President Rene Preval’s administration as working with the United Nations Development Programme and other aid groups to restore electricity and telecommunications, reopen banks, businesses and money-transfer houses, and to provide at least low-paying jobs to Haitians desperate for income.
But it could take as long as three or four months to restore electricity in Port-au-Prince, which is now using generators.
Amid a scarcity of goods, prices have tripled for some products in Haiti, where 80 per cent of the people survive on less than $2 a day. “Inflation is eating them alive,” said UN Development Programme worker Eliane Nicolini.
Edmond Mulet, acting head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti, said coordination in delivering aid was getting better every day.
But Henriette Chamouillet, the World Health Organisation representative in Haiti, said it remained a problem. She said the Haitian prime minister complained at a meeting with aid workers that only 10 per cent of the population in makeshift camps had received any food aid while some camps had received three times the amount of food they needed.
More than 13,000 US military personnel are in Haiti and on ships offshore, flying in supplies, evacuating the seriously wounded and protecting aid distribution points. The United Nations is adding 2,000 troops and 1,500 police to its 9,000-member peacekeeping mission.
More than $1.2 billion has been pledged to help rebuild roads, government buildings and homes, but the World Bank said much more would be needed to get Haiti on its feet.
The Inter-American Development Bank said it was considering granting debt relief for the $441 million Haiti owes the bank.
The International Monetary Fund has urged donors gathering in Montreal tomorrow to adopt a Marshall Plan for Haiti, similar to the US effort that helped rebuild Europe after the second World War.
Reuters