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WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
By Liz Hazelton
Last updated at 3:37 PM on 15th January 2010
* Reports of widespread looting across Port-au-Prince
* Military tell aid agencies they need guards to deal with volatile situation
* 7,000 corpses are dumped in Haiti's first mass grave
* Aid workers pour on to island as emergency fund launched
* Fears for British woman Ann Barnes who worked in collapsed UN building
* Hundreds of criminals on the streets after prison collapses
Desperate Haitians have set up roadblocks of corpses in Port-au-Prince to protest at the lack of emergency aid reaching them after the catastrophic earthquake.
Although billions of pounds has already been pledged to the devastated country, help is only just beginning to trickle through to survivors. Rescue efforts have been blighted by poor infrastructure and lack of heavy lifting equipment - as well as the damage wrought by the disaster. As the situation grows increasingly tense, aid workers were forced to consider security protection just to move round the island.
Bodies fill the front yard of the morgue in Port-au-Prince. Survivors have started using corpses as road blocks
An aerial view shows a ruined cathedral after Tuesday's earthquake. Troops and planeloads of food and medicine streamed into Haiti to aid a traumatised nation
'People who have not been eating or drinking for almost 50 hours and are already in a very poor situation,' UN humanitarian spokesman Elisabeth Byrs said.
'If they see a truck with something, or if they see a supermarket which has collapsed, they just rush to get something to eat.'
The Brazilian military, which commands the UN peacekeeping mission on the island, warned aid convoys to add security to guard against looting.
'Unfortunately, they're slowly getting more angry and impatient' said spokesman David Wimhurst,
'I fear, we're all aware that the situation is getting more tense as the poorest people who need so much are waiting for deliveries. I think tempers might be frayed.'
Shaul Schwarz, a photographer for TIME magazine, said he saw at least two roadblocks formed with bodies of earthquake victims and rocks. 'They are starting to block the roads with bodies. It's getting ugly out there. People are fed up with getting no help,' he said.
There were reports of machete-wielding gangs roaming the debris-strewn streets looking for food. At times fighting broke out as they struggled for scant supplies. The humanitarian crisis in the capital is the worst many aid workers have ever seen.
With streets and buildings littered with rotting corpses and filled with the sounds of screams, some have compared it to a scene from hell.
Ann Barnes
Rezene Tesfamariam, Haiti director of Plan International, described people using bare hands, shovels and pick axes to reach people still trapped beneath collapsed buildings. He said: "There are people still alive underneath, you can hear them crying for help, but time is running out. It is beyond the means of individuals to reach them. 'They are trying move concrete with their hands. What is desperately needed is proper machinery and equipment to lift the rubble.
Mr Tesfamariam, who lost his own home in the quake, described the disaster was the worst he had witnessed in his many years as an aid worker. 'I have seen refugees fleeing war and cyclones hitting villages, but in those cases at least you have time to run away,' he said.
'In just a few seconds so many lives were wiped out. Port-au-Prince looks like it has been bombed. 'My house has been destroyed. I went back there (in the aftermath) and a neighbour called my name. She said there were children under the rubble. I shouted to them and they called back.
'I reported it to the UN so they would know where to come and get them out but there are people everywhere crying out for help. It is one thing I will never be able forget.' Thousands of injured people spent a third night twisted in pain, lying on pavements waiting for help as their despair turned to anger.
'We've been out here waiting for three days and three nights but nothing has been done for us, not even a word of encouragement from the president,' said Pierre Jackson, nursing his mother and sister who lay whimpering with crushed legs.
'What should we do?
Miracle: Rescuers carry a three-month-old baby found alive after being buried under rubble for two days
Despairing: Amid a scene of total devastation, one resident sits on a chair, his head in his
hand
Survivors gathered around bodies in Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince photographed during a joint Red Cross Red Crescent/ECHO (European Community Humanitarian Organization) aerial assessment mission
The Haitian Red Cross said it believed 45,000 to 50,000 people had died and 3 million more - one third of Haiti's population - were injured or left homeless by the 7.0 quake that hit on Tuesday.
Fears were growing today for British woman Ann Barnes, a PA to the United Nations police commissioner in Haiti.
The UN headquarters in Port-au-Prince has completely collapsed, killing many who were inside.
Miss Barnes has been missing since the earthquake though the UN have not confirmed that she is among the dead.
Officials from the Foreign Office said that 30 other British nationals living in Port-au-Prince had been in touch and were safe and well.
The Haitian government - weak even before the disaster - has all but disintegrated leaving the island teetering on the brink of anarchy.
Hundreds of criminals escaped when the island's main prison collapsed. Looters swarmed unchallenged into collapsed supermarkets and warehouses, snatching electronics and bags of rice. Officials are making increasingly desperate efforts to deal with the tens of thousands of dead. Presidents Rene Preval said that 7,000 people were yesterday buried in a mass grave. The Haitian Red Cross has run out of body bags.
Corpses were piled on pickup trucks and delivered to the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince, where hospital director Guy LaRoche estimated the bodies piled outside the morgue numbered 1,500. Aid workers reported seeing children sleeping among the dead.
Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, presents unique logistical challenges for aid workers.
Thousands of homeless people have set up tent cities as they wait for aid to arrive
People gather around a petrol pump seeking fuel. Petrol shortage is causing long queues and angry customers
HOW BID TO SAVE TRAPPED GIRL ENDED IN TRAGEDY
Trapped beneath the crumbled remains of her home, the 9-year-old girl could be heard begging for rescue as neighbours clawed at sand and debris with their bare hands. It had been two days since the earthquake collapsed the house, trapping Haryssa Keem Clerge inside the basement. Friends and neighbours braved aftershocks to climb over the rubble, one of hundreds of toppled structures teetering on the side of a ravine. In a city full of people desperately waiting for more help than neighbors can muster, it never came for Haryssa. Just hours after her screams renewed rescuers' hopes, the child's lifeless body was finally pulled from the mass of concrete and twisted metal. Wrapped in a green bath towel, it was placed inside a loose desk drawer. With nowhere to take it, the body was then left on the hood of a battered Isuzu Trooper. 'There are no police, no anybody,' said the child's despairing godmother, Kettely Clerge. Neighbours had to hold her back as she walked toward the building's winding, partially collapsed stairway, wailing: 'I want to see her!' A day earlier, the little girl's mother, Lauranie Jean, was pulled from the rubble of the same house. She lay moaning inside a tent as volunteers rubbed ointment into open wounds on her sides. The family has now taken refuge in a dirt playground - one of hundreds of open spaces across Port-au-Prince that people are filling each night to try to avoid the risk of aftershocks.Although billions of pounds has already been pledged to the devastated country, help is only just beginning to trickle through to survivors. Rescue efforts have been blighted by poor infrastructure and lack of heavy lifting equipment - as well as the damage wrought by the disaster. As the situation grows increasingly tense, aid workers were forced to consider security protection just to move round the island.
Bodies fill the front yard of the morgue in Port-au-Prince. Survivors have started using corpses as road blocks
An aerial view shows a ruined cathedral after Tuesday's earthquake. Troops and planeloads of food and medicine streamed into Haiti to aid a traumatised nation
'People who have not been eating or drinking for almost 50 hours and are already in a very poor situation,' UN humanitarian spokesman Elisabeth Byrs said.
'If they see a truck with something, or if they see a supermarket which has collapsed, they just rush to get something to eat.'
The Brazilian military, which commands the UN peacekeeping mission on the island, warned aid convoys to add security to guard against looting.
'Unfortunately, they're slowly getting more angry and impatient' said spokesman David Wimhurst,
'I fear, we're all aware that the situation is getting more tense as the poorest people who need so much are waiting for deliveries. I think tempers might be frayed.'
Shaul Schwarz, a photographer for TIME magazine, said he saw at least two roadblocks formed with bodies of earthquake victims and rocks. 'They are starting to block the roads with bodies. It's getting ugly out there. People are fed up with getting no help,' he said.
There were reports of machete-wielding gangs roaming the debris-strewn streets looking for food. At times fighting broke out as they struggled for scant supplies. The humanitarian crisis in the capital is the worst many aid workers have ever seen.
With streets and buildings littered with rotting corpses and filled with the sounds of screams, some have compared it to a scene from hell.
Ann Barnes
Rezene Tesfamariam, Haiti director of Plan International, described people using bare hands, shovels and pick axes to reach people still trapped beneath collapsed buildings. He said: "There are people still alive underneath, you can hear them crying for help, but time is running out. It is beyond the means of individuals to reach them. 'They are trying move concrete with their hands. What is desperately needed is proper machinery and equipment to lift the rubble.
Mr Tesfamariam, who lost his own home in the quake, described the disaster was the worst he had witnessed in his many years as an aid worker. 'I have seen refugees fleeing war and cyclones hitting villages, but in those cases at least you have time to run away,' he said.
'In just a few seconds so many lives were wiped out. Port-au-Prince looks like it has been bombed. 'My house has been destroyed. I went back there (in the aftermath) and a neighbour called my name. She said there were children under the rubble. I shouted to them and they called back.
'I reported it to the UN so they would know where to come and get them out but there are people everywhere crying out for help. It is one thing I will never be able forget.' Thousands of injured people spent a third night twisted in pain, lying on pavements waiting for help as their despair turned to anger.
'We've been out here waiting for three days and three nights but nothing has been done for us, not even a word of encouragement from the president,' said Pierre Jackson, nursing his mother and sister who lay whimpering with crushed legs.
'What should we do?
Miracle: Rescuers carry a three-month-old baby found alive after being buried under rubble for two days
Despairing: Amid a scene of total devastation, one resident sits on a chair, his head in his
handSurvivors gathered around bodies in Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince photographed during a joint Red Cross Red Crescent/ECHO (European Community Humanitarian Organization) aerial assessment mission
The Haitian Red Cross said it believed 45,000 to 50,000 people had died and 3 million more - one third of Haiti's population - were injured or left homeless by the 7.0 quake that hit on Tuesday.
Fears were growing today for British woman Ann Barnes, a PA to the United Nations police commissioner in Haiti.
The UN headquarters in Port-au-Prince has completely collapsed, killing many who were inside.
Miss Barnes has been missing since the earthquake though the UN have not confirmed that she is among the dead.
Officials from the Foreign Office said that 30 other British nationals living in Port-au-Prince had been in touch and were safe and well.
The Haitian government - weak even before the disaster - has all but disintegrated leaving the island teetering on the brink of anarchy.
Hundreds of criminals escaped when the island's main prison collapsed. Looters swarmed unchallenged into collapsed supermarkets and warehouses, snatching electronics and bags of rice. Officials are making increasingly desperate efforts to deal with the tens of thousands of dead. Presidents Rene Preval said that 7,000 people were yesterday buried in a mass grave. The Haitian Red Cross has run out of body bags.
Corpses were piled on pickup trucks and delivered to the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince, where hospital director Guy LaRoche estimated the bodies piled outside the morgue numbered 1,500. Aid workers reported seeing children sleeping among the dead.
Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, presents unique logistical challenges for aid workers.
Thousands of homeless people have set up tent cities as they wait for aid to arrive
People gather around a petrol pump seeking fuel. Petrol shortage is causing long queues and angry customersHOW BID TO SAVE TRAPPED GIRL ENDED IN TRAGEDY
Ships are struggling to use the ruined port, while aid organisations said there appeared to be little coordination of supplies arriving at the reopened airport. At one point planes were arriving faster than ground crews could handle them and US authorities had to restrict flights to Haiti for fear they would run out of fuel before they could land.
The Haitian government said that there was no room on ramps for planes to unload their cargo and that some planes on the ground didn't have enough fuel to leave. Overhead, two dozen planes circled for more than two hours, and many of them were diverted to Santo Domingo or Florida.
Planes were parked with their wing tips overlapping. Haiti has little or no heavy equipment to move rubble and attempts were being made to bring some from the neighbouring Dominican Republic, along a narrow and easily-clogged road.
Aid has been delivered or promised from 30 countries. China sent a plane carrying ten tons of tents, food and medical equipment, as well as an earthquake rescue team. The British government donated £6million to an appeal up by the Disasters Emergency Committee for what Gordon Brown called a 'tragedy beyond imagination'.
The first British search and rescue workers to reach Haiti were today scouring the rubble for survivors. U.S. President Barack Obama pledged an initial $100million (£61.4million) for Haiti quake relief on Thursday and enlisted former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to help raise more, vowing to the Haitian people: 'You will not be forsaken.'
The United States was sending 3,500 soldiers, 300 medical personnel, several ships and 2,200 Marines to Haiti.
Nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson will arrive today to serve as a 'floating airport' for relief operations by its 19 helicopters. Doctors in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, were ill-equipped to treat the injured.
Many hospitals are too badly damaged to use, and medics struggled to treat crushed limbs and head wounds at makeshift clinics.
Shanty towns on the outskirts of the Haitian capital were flattened by the earthquake - the worst to strike the island nation in 200 years
James Girly, 64, of the US is brought out of a destroyed building of the Montana Hotel where he was trapped for 50 hours in Port-au-PrinceIn the car park of the capital's L'Hopital de la Paix, those awaiting treatment lay among the dead and dying in 90f heat.
A tearful man pointed to his young daughter, her legs broken and face gashed. Her sister had died.
A little boy sobbed among the bodies while two injured women, their legs crushed, propped each other up.
In a makeshift hospital at the Hotel Villa Creole Margaret Germaine-Doillard, a French teacher in her 40s, lay on the ground drifting in and out of consciousness.
She was on a second-floor balcony of her school when the earthquake struck, celebrating a belated Christmas party with more than 300 students and teachers.
Survivors: Redjeson Hausteen, two, is carried from his collapsed home by a rescue worker while Gladys Loiuis Jeune is pulled alive from the rubble nearly 43 hours after Tuesday's earthquake
An injured man in a wheelchair looks at the collapsed Haitian Governmental taxation building
There is no way to know how many died at St-Louis de Gonzague, a prestigious Roman Catholic school where some of Haiti's leaders have studied, including former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier.
Germaine-Doillard said she knew of only about 10 students, several teachers and the school's principal who survived.
As she lay in the 80-degree heat, her thoughts remained with her pupils. 'We couldn't save the students,' she murmured. 'We couldn't save the students.'
BRITS DONATE £2m IN JUST 36 HOURS
Britons have donated more than £2 million to help earthquake-stricken Haiti in the space of just 36 hours.
The money was given even before an appeal on TV and radio for The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), which is co-ordinating the Haiti Earthquake Appeal on behalf of 13 UK aid agencies, by journalist Mariella Frostrup was broadcast today. Donations can be made through a special telephone line, 0370 60 60 900, and through its website www.dec.org.uk.
It was the through the DEC that the £16 million - a world record for a newspaper appeal - donated by Daily Mail readers following the 2004 tsunami, was channelled. Aid to Haiti will be distributed through the 13 UK member agencies - Action Aid, British Red Cross, CAFOD, Care International UK, Christian Aid, Concern Worldwide, Help the Aged, Islamic Relief, Merlin, Oxfam, Save the Children, Tearfund and World Vision.
DEC chief executive Brendan Gormley said: 'We are delighted at the generosity of the British people even before our major television and radio appeals hit the airwaves. 'Efforts on the ground have been hampered by a lack of power and communications problems after the devastating quake but aid is starting to get through and DEC members are working hard in the field.
'Our message to the public is: thank you for your efforts so far but it is vitally important that people continue to donate to increase the amount of aid that can be delivered to help the millions of people affected by this terrible earthquake.' The £2 million figure for online giving was hit at around 8am yesterday. Donations by other means are not included.
Among the donations was a private gift from the Queen, said a DEC spokesman. The appeal was publicised initially by a Twitter message spread virally through internet social networks. It was helped by high-profile endorsements, including from Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
A DEC spokesman said giving money was the best way to help so supplies could be purchased as close as possible to the disaster area and sent straight to those in need. He said, where possible, emergency supplies would be bought in areas of Haiti which are not affected by the disaster.
THE GOOGLE IMAGES THAT SHOW SCALE OF DISASTER
Google have also released satellite images of the devastation caused in Haiti, after being asked by relief organisations and users to provide up to date images of the country.
The pictures show the amount of damage caused to building in the Port-au-Prince, as well as thedestruction caused to the national palace.
Before (left) and after satellite images released by Google Maps and GeoEye after the earthquake
Satellite images show the damage caused to a large section of the National Palace in the 7.0 quake
These before and after pictures of the Sylvio Cator Stadium in Haiti show the earthquake has destroyed part of the building and left the ground strewn with debris
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