Despite dimming odds, rescue workers pulled more people alive from the rubble — including a 7-year-old girl who survived more than four days eating dried fruit rolls in the supermarket that collapsed around her — as water and emergency aid deliveries improved on Sunday, though not nearly enough to meet Haiti’s desperate need.
The mood managed to stay mostly calm, as residents carried leather-bound Bibles to pray outside their ruined churches. But there were reports of more looting and shootings, including of four men who witnesses said were shot by the police on suspicion of looting. There were fewer bodies in the streets, though in some places residents began burning corpses left behind.
Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, arrived to offer a promise of improvement from his organization, which was itself badly hit by the quake but was still heavily criticized for the slow pace of the emergency response.
“I am here with a message of hope that help is on the way,” Mr. Ban told a crowd of Haitians in front of the severely damaged National Palace.
On the fifth day after the earthquake, there were signs of improvement, possibly even hope that the worst was passing. Traffic at the airport continued to increase, and there were 27 rescue teams on the ground, with 1,500 people searching for survivors.
The best news came in the form of a small voice from deep in a pile of rubble at the Caribbean Supermarket in the Delmas neighborhood, heard overnight late Saturday or early Sunday. As the odds of finding more survivors fell steeply, American and Turkish rescue workers were stunned to discover a small Haitian girl, who proudly told them that she made it through with hope and leathery fruit snacks.
She was the first of five people to be pulled from the wreckage during a search spanning the weekend, some of whom sent desperate text messages to let loved ones know they were trapped. She was deeply shaken, having been trapped for days in a small space in a devastated market, with death in every aisle. But she had not been pinned down by debris and was not hurt, according to Capt. Joseph Zahralban of the South Florida search and rescue team.
“If you have to be trapped in a collapsed building, a stocked supermarket is probably the best place to be,” Captain Zahralban said.
Among the rescuers at the store were members of a joint New York police and fire rescue team, who had arrived in Haiti on Saturday, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly of New York said Sunday in a telephone interview. He said the team included 80 people and several rescue dogs.
There were several other reported rescues around the city, including a 2-month-old baby, CNN reported, and Jens Kristensen, a Danish civilian employee of the United Nations peacekeeping forces at the Christopher Hotel, the organization’s headquarters here, where perhaps 100 of its workers remained buried.
At the airport, American military officials said that waiting times for landing had declined, while traffic had increased. Each day, there are 100 slots for incoming planes — well exceeding the 30 to 35 flights that the airport handled before the earthquake. But in a sign of both Haiti’s needs and the response, even that is not close to handling the number of planes waiting to come in.
“There is certainly more demand than 100 a day,” said Maj. Matthew Jones of the Air Force, operations officer of the joint task force running the airport. “However, no one has been denied a slot, but there may be a delay. Sometimes if it’s not today, it’s tomorrow.”
The military has established a priority list for providing slots, Major Jones said. At the top are planes bringing in water. Next is equipment for distributing supplies, followed by food and then medical personnel and medicine.
In Port-au-Prince, the stepped-up effort appeared to be paying off and aid was finally reaching at least some of Haiti’s desperate, with varying degrees of order.
On Sunday morning, a United Nations truck appeared in the park near the presidential palace, where hundreds of families have been squatting since the earthquake. They handed out bags of water to a crowd mostly appreciative, with only a little shoving.
The World Food Program also sent at least three convoys to different locations badly affected by the earthquake, with a goal of delivering enough nourishment to last 65,000 people five days.
But the scene at one delivery site suggested that the food — rations of fortified biscuits, each one about the size of a graham cracker — would hardly last the ravenous victims one night. And the agency’s distribution methods nearly started a riot when throngs of people who had lost everything mobbed one of the trucks in the convoy.
“It’s not their fault,” said Guerrier Ernso, looking on at the mob. “They are hungry.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/world/americas/18quake.html?hp
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