PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Countries around the world continued to pour relief supplies and medical teams into quake-rattled Haiti on Friday, but huge logistical hurdles and the sheer scale of the destruction meant aid was still not reaching hundreds of thousands of victims.
Death and desperation were everywhere in the capital as residents raced against time to rescue buried survivors.
Chaotic streets were jam-packed with people wandering aimlessly, plugging their noses and covering their faces with handkerchiefs.
There were still few signs of official rescue efforts, but local residents continued to dig through debris with hammers and their bare hands.
"Come over here, there are people dead. Look, look look," pleaded one resident.
The Pan American Health Organization estimated the death toll could be 50,000 to 100,000, higher than previous figures.
Haitian authorities have already buried 40,000 bodies, Haiti's secretary of state for public safety, Aramick Louis, said Friday.
The desperation was also giving way to lawlessness.
Reports of sporadic scavenging and looting raised of security concerns.
In one section of the pummelled city, gangs of looters scurried down streets with sticks in their hands and items stashed under their shirts.
One man was observed in a wheelbarrow, bleeding heavily through a sheet but still alive. Witnesses say he was shot in the chest by a police officer.
Few police can be seen on patrol, but one Haitian officer with a rifle and a gas mask was seen as gun shots could be heard firing in the distance.
At one destroyed supermarket scores of people swarmed over the rubble to try to reach the food underneath. Just outside Cite 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, built roadblocks with corpses.
To add to the security concerns, the Red Cross said as many as 4,000 prisoners may have escaped when the Port-au-Prince prison was destroyed in the quake.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the security situation on the ground in Haiti remained “pretty good.”
“The key is to get the food and the water in there as quickly as possible so that people don’t in their desperation turn to violence or lead to the security situation deteriorating,” Gates told reporters in Washington.
The United States is leading the massive international relief effort.
At the airport, now under the control of the U.S. military, planes were arriving every 20 minutes.
But in streets strewn with rubble, garbage and rotting bodies, most Haitians said they had still received nothing.
“I haven’t eaten since the day before yesterday,” said Bertilie Francis, 43, who was with her three children.
“We are here by the Grace of God, nobody else,” she said.
Relief workers said some aid was trickling through to people but in haphazard fashion. “Some aid is slowly getting through, but not to many people,” said Margaret Aguirre, a senior official with International Medical Corps.
The United States said the arrival of its nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson with 19 helicopters on Friday would open a second significant channel to deliver help.
“Up until now we’ve been delivering assistance through a garden hose but now we are expanding that,” U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said.
But Port-au-Prince’s airport had limited capacity and the port remained unusable.
Up to 10,000 U.S. troops are expected to be on the ground or off the coast of Haiti by Monday.
UN aid agencies are launching an emergency appeal for approximately $550 million to help survivors.
United Nations disaster experts said at least 10% of housing in the Haitian capital was destroyed, leaving about 300,000 homeless, but in some areas 50% of buildings were destroyed or badly damaged.
Among the fallen buildings is a hotel flattened like a pancake, corpses jutting out from the rubble.
Nearby, Bolivian UN troops could be seen handing out plates of brown rice to children and women.
- With files from Reuters
