New York Times, By Liz Robbins, January 12

A powerful earthquake of 7.0 magnitude rocked Haiti just before 5 p.m. Eastern time, 10 miles southwest from the highly populated capital of Port-au-Prince, according to the United States Geological Survey, causing widespread damage and panic with the potential for a high number of casualties in the impoverished Caribbean country

There were five aftershocks — the worst two were 5.9 and 5.2 magnitude — that followed in the last hour, and more were expected, according to David Wald, a seismologist with the survey.

[...]

The White House said President Obama was informed of the earthquake at 5:52 p.m. He directed his staff to begin preparations in case humanitarian assistance is needed. The State Department, the United States Agency for International Development and the United States Southern Command began working to coordinate an assessment, aides said.

“My thoughts and prayers go out to those who have been affected by this earthquake,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “We are closely monitoring the situation and we stand ready to assist the people of Haiti.”

The Times, January 12

A major earthquake hit the impoverished country of Haiti today, destroying buildings including the presidential palace and a hospital in the capital Port-au-Prince and burying residents under rubble.

Quake 'levels Haiti presidential palace'
11:28 AEST Wed Jan 13 2010

Haiti's presidential palace and numerous other government buildings in the country's capital Port-au-Prince collapsed on Tuesday after a massive 7.0 earthquake, Haitian television streaming online reports.

Communications to the island, the most impoverished in the western hemisphere, were cut in the wake of the massive earthquake on Tuesday, which produced several aftershocks and prompted a tsunami warning.

A journalist with Haitian television station Haitipal, interviewed by telephone from Port-au-Prince, told the station that public buildings across the capital had been destroyed.

"The presidential palace, the finance ministry, the ministry of public works, the ministry of communication and culture," were all affected by the quake, the reporter said, adding that the parliament building and a cathedral in the capital were also crumbling.

bbc with video

The extent of the devastation from a huge quake in Haiti is slowly emerging, with a number of UN peacekeepers among thousands of people feared dead.

Jordan, Brazil and China have all reported deaths. UN chief Ban Ki-moon said the head of the UN mission in Haiti and many others were missing.

The 7.0-magnitude quake, Haiti's worst in two centuries, struck south of the capital, Port-au-Prince, on Tuesday.

The Red Cross says up to three million people have been affected.

Describing the earthquake as a "catastrophe", Haiti's envoy to the US said the cost of the damage could run into billions of dollars.

A number of nations, including the US, UK and Venezuela, are gearing up to send aid.

The quake, which struck about 15km (10 miles) south-west of Port-au-Prince, was quickly followed by two aftershocks of 5.9 and 5.5 magnitude.

The first tremor had hit at 1653 local time (2153 GMT) on Tuesday, the US Geological Survey said. Phone lines to the country failed shortly afterwards.

UN officials said at least five people had died when the UN's headquarters in Port au Prince collapsed and that more than 100 staff were unaccounted for and feared to be under the rubble.

Ban Ki-moon: 'We are facing a major humanitarian emergency'

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said: "It would appear that all those who were in the building, including my friend [UN mission head] Hedi Annabi... and all those who were with him and around him are dead."

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon confirmed the Tunisian head of the UN mission in Haiti and his deputy were missing, along with many others.

more

Haiti earthquake: With aid groups already there, relief efforts ramp up quickly

The Guardian not as much:
Heavy death toll feared in Haiti quake

BBC IN PICTURES

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8456819.stm

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/01/13/haiti.earthquake/

Obama Pledges Sweeping Aid Effort; Haiti Red Cross Says Toll May Be 50,000

New York Times, By Helene Cooper & Simon Romero, January 14

WASHINGTON —President Obama promised $100 million for the relief effort in Haiti on Thursday morning, vowing that the United States would stand with the impoverished nation as it counted what could be tens of thousands of dead and grappled with the devastation of the Tuesday earthquake.

In an emotional address from the White House Diplomatic Reception room, Mr. Obama promised that amount was only a first installment and that financial assistance would increase over the coming year. “I want to speak directly to the people of Haiti,” Mr. Obama said. He paused for a moment.

“You will not be forsaken, you will not be forgotten,” he said. “In this, your hour of greatest need, America stands with you.”

On streets of Haiti's capital two days after quake, growing despair

Washington Post, By Mary Beth Sheridan, William Booth & Manuel Roig-Franzia, January 15

Port-au-Prince - The news on the radio delivered the latest shock to Ives Sima: The eight-story technical college run by his cousin in the Haitian capital had collapsed in Tuesday's massive earthquake.

Sima, a high school biology teacher, jumped onto his bicycle and pedaled the nine miles from his home to the wrecked building. He wanted to offer the only tool he had: his hands.

All day Thursday, Sima and a handful of other volunteers using small, dull saws and broken windowpanes were the only rescuers searching for dozens of missing students and teachers at St. Gérard's Technical School in Port-au-Prince. Eventually, a volunteer turned up with a dump truck, a student's relative with a generator for a drill.

"It's the families of the victims -- it's not the government," said Sima, 32, whose cousin Louis Larosilière had founded the college. "For us, the government doesn't exist at all."

Time running out as aid fails to reach Haiti

• Huge rescue effort stalled by wrecked airport and docks
• Agencies warn it could be days before vital supplies land
• Casualties go untreated as bodies pile up in the street

* Ed Pilkington in Santo Domingo, Peter Beaumont and Peter Walker
* The Guardian, Friday 15 January 2010
* Article history

The UN distributes aid, international rescue teams leave for Haiti, and the exiled president says he would like to return Link to this video

A massive international air and sea lift of aid to earthquake-devastated Haiti was struggling last night to overcome ­obstacles in delivering rescue teams and emergency help to the more than 2 million people in need of immediate assistance.

Confronted by bottlenecks caused by wrecked runways, port ­facilities and roads, aid experts were warning it could be days before the relief effort gets fully under way, even as thousands of people remained unaccounted for beneath the rubble of Tuesday's quake and bodies were piled in the ruined streets.

The Red Cross estimated 45,000-50,000 people were killed in the magnitude 7.0 earthquake. Last night Haiti's president, René Préval, said: "We have already buried 7,000 people in a mass grave."

Aid agencies fear the crucial 72-hour window to find survivors would be missed if the help did not start getting through. Compounding the ­desperate problems, America's civil aviation authority was forced to halt planes leaving the US for Haiti at the request of the Haitian ­government because there was no more room for them to land and no fuel for the planes to return.

US officials said Port-au-Prince's ­airport was saturated and ground staff could not unload and move supplies into ­surrounding areas quickly enough to open up more space at the airport.

Among those unable to land yesterday was a team of 35 British rescue workers, including firefighters and doctors from Manchester and Lincolnshire, who spent 30 minutes circling above Port-au-Prince airport and were forced to turn back after they were running out of fuel.

Eyewitness accounts from Haiti described bodies decomposing in the streets, while the few hospitals not destroyed were overwhelmed with casualties. Others described whole neighbourhoods destroyed. "Many roads are blocked by fallen buildings. Many people walking around with open and serious wounds," said Port-au-Prince resident Tara Livesay on her blog.

"The deceased are being dragged to the side of roads, covered in sheets and left. We don't live in the hardest hit areas but even so there are many bodies."

As a sense of crisis grew over the slow speed of the emergency response, Elisabeth Byrs of the UN's office for the ­coordination of humanitarian affairs, said: "The priority is to find survivors. We are working against the clock."

The problems confronting the ­emergency efforts were disclosed even as Barack Obama appealed to his ­immediate predecessors, George Bush and Bill ­Clinton, to help co-ordinate the US efforts to help Haiti, in what Obama described as "one of the largest relief efforts in our recent history".

His comments came as he ordered the deployment of thousands of troops and civilian aid workers and promised $100m in relief funds. "To the people of Haiti, we say clearly and with conviction, you will not be forsaken, you will not be ­forgotten," he said.

The US army and marines are sending some 5,500 troops while more than six US military ships are being sent, including the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson. Britain, which has also promised £6m in immediate aid, was among a host of ­countries pledging to send assistance, including China, France, Mexico and Australia.

One of the most pressing problems the effort will have to overcome is the damage to the docks.

"The derricks at the port, which would be our preferred route to deliver food, are too badly damaged to be operable," said Gregory Barrow of the World Food ­Programme, which is appealing to donors for 14m ­ration packs that can be eaten without cooking – enough to feed 2 million people for a month. "Many of the people we need to feed have no cooking utensils or kitchens which is why the rations are urgently required."

At the airport, the main concourse was hit by the earthquake with the number of working runways reduced from three to one. In addition there has been a shortage of heavy lifting equipment suitable to unload most non-military kinds of ­aircraft quickly, while damage to the control tower has also limited the types of aircraft that could land.

"The airport is only really open to ­aircraft that have their own heavy lift," said Ian Bray of Oxfam, whose offices in Port-au-Prince were destroyed with the loss of one of their staff. "There is a bottleneck. We have staff in Miami and Dominican Republic we are still trying to deploy into the country. Another of the problems we are facing is the lack of effective communications with Haiti which affects how quickly we can make decisions about what we should be sending and to where."

A further problem reported by aid agencies was that many of their staff were looking for their own families. "Many of our own staff are still looking for their own families," said Harjeet Singh, head of emergencies for Americas for ActionAid. "It is completely normal and very human. But it does mean that any work, even an initial assessment of what needs to be done, is going to be difficult."

The road route from the Dominican Republic was also proving problematic, with a key bridge damaged preventing large convoys from crossing.

Alejandro Lopez-Chicheri of the WFP, who arrived in Port-au-Prince yesterday, as the organisation began distributing food at hospitals, gave a devastating depiction of the aftermath. "It is very difficult," he told the Guardian yesterday. "Many people are sleeping outside. Many people are sleeping at the stadium and in the parks. They are afraid of secondary shocks.

"We are setting up in several parts of Port-au-Prince. There are aircraft coming in. I have seen some. But for now we are focusing on the hospitals – feeding the sick and the most badly injured who need it most.

"In the city I've seen neighbourhoods that are totally destroyed. There is a problem with water. I'm hearing reports of scores of thousands dead."

Jimitre Coquillon, a doctor's ­assistant working at a triage centre set up in a hotel parking lot told the Associated Press: "This is much worse than a ­hurricane. There's no water. There's nothing. Thirsty people are going to die."

By RICK CALLAHAN

(01/15/10 00:09:25)

Scientists who detected worrisome signs of growing stresses in the fault that unleashed this week's devastating earthquake in Haiti said they warned officials there two years ago that their country was ripe for a major earthquake.

Their sobering findings, presented during a geological conference in March 2008 and at meetings two months later, showed that the fault was capable of causing a 7.2-magnitude earthquake - slightly stronger than Tuesday's 7.0 quake that rocked the impoverished country.

Though Haitian officials listened intently to the research, the nearly two years between the presentation and the devastating quake was not enough time for Haiti to have done much to have prevented the massive destruction.

"It's too short of a timeframe to really do something, particularly for a country like Haiti, but even in a developed country it's very difficult to start very big operations in two years," Eric Calais, a professor of geophysics at Purdue University, said Thursday.

Their conclusions also lacked a specific timeframe that could have prodded quick action to shore up the hospitals, schools and other buildings that collapsed and crumbled, said Paul Mann, a senior research scientist at the University of Texas' Institute for Geophysics.

At the time of earthquake, which the international Red Cross estimated killed 45,000 to 50,000 people, Haiti was still trying to recover from a string catastrophes. In 2008 alone, it was hit four times by tropical storms and hurricanes. The country also suffers from a string of social ills including poverty, unstable governments and poor building standards that make buildings vulnerable in earthquakes.

"Haiti's government has so many other problems that when you give sort of an unspecific prediction about an earthquake threat they just don't have the resources to deal with that sort of thing," Mann said.

In March 2008, Calais and Mann were among a group of scientists who presented findings on the major quake risk along the Enriquillo fault during the conference in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. Their conclusions were based both on geologic work Mann conducted along the same fault and recent findings by Calais.

Calais had detected rising stresses along the fault using global positioning system measurements that showed that the Earth's crust in the area where the fault traverses southern Haiti was slowly deforming as pressure grew within the fault.

That pressure, paired with Mann's work and the fact that the last major quake in the area was in 1770, led to the prediction that the fault could produce a 7.2-magnitude temblor.

Calais said he also presented the findings to officials in Haiti during a series of meetings in May 2008 that included the country's prime minister and other high-ranking officials. He said he stressed to the officials that if they did nothing else they should at least begin reinforcing hospitals, schools and key government buildings to weather a strong quake.

"We were taken very seriously but unfortunately it didn't translate into action," he said. "The reality is that it was too short of a timeframe to really do something, particularly for a country like Haiti struggling with so many problems."

Calais said Haiti has no seismic stations for monitoring quake activity, while adjoining Dominican Republic has a small seismic network.

more

Looters roam Port-au-Prince as earthquake death toll estimate climbs

Hunger and thirst turn to violence in Haiti as planes unable to offload aid supplies fast enough

The Guardian, By Rory Carroll, January 16

The death toll from Haiti's earthquake climbed to as high as an estimated 140,000, as logistical bottlenecks delayed aid and stoked looting by survivors desperate for food and water.

A flotilla of ships anchored offshore while aircraft circled overhead, but only a trickle of supplies and emergency teams made it onto the shattered streets of Port-au-Prince, where the desperation was turning into violence.

Groups of men with machetes roved the ruins seeking supplies of food or water; others used corpses as roadblocks, a macabre sign that the capital had reached breaking point after four days of apocalyptic scenes. "They are scavenging everything. What can you do?" Michel Legros, 53, told AP as he waited for help to search for seven of relatives buried in his collapsed house.

Aramick Louis, secretary of state for public safety, told Reuters the death toll had exceeded 140,000. "We have buried 40,000 people. We think there are 100,000 more on top of that."

Pat Robertson said the Haiti earthquake was God's punishment for Haitian slaves' 'pact with the devil' to win freedom from France. But many French noted that Haiti's revolution was inspired by France's and considered an early exercise in self-determination.

By Robert Marquand Staff writer
posted January 14, 2010 at 1:48 pm EST
Paris — CSM

It took about five nanoseconds for evangelical Pat Robertson’s video verdict on the causes of the Haiti earthquake to start making the rounds in France.

Mr. Robertson’s theory that Haitian slaves made a “pact with the devil” 200 years ago in order to free themselves from the hated clutches of Napoleon Bonaparte's regime – resulting in a curse that led to the destruction of much of Port-au-Prince and a massive loss of life in Tuesday's earthquake – got the usual chuckles of disbelief among local intelligentsia about American culture.

It was bad enough that he said the successful slave revolt came during the reign of "Napoleon III, or whatever" (the Haitian Revolution led by Francois-Dominique Toussaint L'ouverture was in fact completed in 1804 when Napoleon Bonaparte ruled France, 44 years before his nephew Napoleon III came to power). But here in Haiti’s former colonial master, talk about the Robertson “theory” clouds with myth an early if awkward chapter in self-determination: the Haitian slaves are considered the first to collectively and successfully overthrow their colonial masters. In this case, the French.

After the French revolution, in 1794, the 500,000 slaves brought from Africa to work Haiti's lucrative sugar and coffee plantations, were freed by decree. But Napoleon Bonaparte, seeking empire, wealth, and territory, tried re-enslave them in 1802.

Once slaves breathed the free air, they did not wish to return to their former status as drones or fodder for empire. Toussaint L'ouverture, a house slave whose father came from Africa, and whose master, Count de Breda, educated him – stepped up. Mr. L'ouverture’s reading of French enlightenment and revolutionary writers Mirabeau and Voltaire is thought to have been extensive. The slave revolt itself took place in the name of the values and ideals of the French revolution in many readings of history here.

Haiti had been “a hell on earth” for the slaves, writes Le Monde’s history specialist, Jerome Gautheret. “Each year, 50,000 slaves were brought to Haiti to compensate for the … terrible mortality among the slaves. In such a fragile society, order could only be precarious, based on terror and violence: the French Revolution shook it in an irreversible way. In Paris, while ‘Friends of the Blacks’ pled for civil equality for all free men and gradual emancipation of the slaves, a powerful colonial party [in Haiti] tried to maintain the status quo.”

Quoted Thursday on Salon.com, UCLA anthropologist Andrew Apter says the notion of a “pact with the devil” as behind the slave victory “is so absurd it is almost funny. This notion of a pact with the devil is basically an echo of an old colonial response to the successes of the 1790s Haitian revolution.”

The problem for Haiti is that if it was a hell on earth under slavery, it was also so after the slave revolt, French historians argue. Africans plucked and sent to Haiti to work under the lash and suddenly freed were not a model constituency for civil society. Haiti went from the largest sugar exporter in the world to chaos. “The plantations were deserted. The former slaves refused to work on the places they were enslaved,” Mr. Apter said.

An emerging understanding of Haiti during this time is of an island increasingly divided between the 30,000 to 40,000 mixed race former slaves, and the more recently arrived slaves from Africa.

UCLA’s Apter argues, “the reason Haiti is poor is because Europe imposed a blockade on trade after the slave revolt in 1804, and you have an extremely polarized class structure in which a few families stepped into the positions of the former colonial plantation owners. There has been a horrible cycle of plundering and autocracy within Haitian leadership.”

New York Times, By Mark Danner, January 21

HAITI is everybody’s cherished tragedy. Long before the great earthquake struck the country like a vengeful god, the outside world, and Americans especially, described, defined, marked Haiti most of all by its suffering. Epithets of misery clatter after its name like a ball and chain: Poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. One of the poorest on earth. For decades Haiti’s formidable immiseration has made it among outsiders an object of fascination, wonder and awe. Sometimes the pity that is attached to the land — and we see this increasingly in the news coverage this past week — attains a tone almost sacred, as if Haiti has taken its place as a kind of sacrificial victim among nations, nailed in its bloody suffering to the cross of unending destitution.

And yet there is nothing mystical in Haiti’s pain, no inescapable curse that haunts the land. From independence and before, Haiti’s harms have been caused by men, not demons. Act of nature that it was, the earthquake last week was able to kill so many because of the corruption and weakness of the Haitian state, a state built for predation and plunder. Recovery can come only with vital, even heroic, outside help; but such help, no matter how inspiring the generosity it embodies, will do little to restore Haiti unless it addresses, as countless prior interventions built on transports of sympathy have not, the manmade causes that lie beneath the Haitian malady.

Miami Herald, By Jacqueline Charles, January 23

PORT-AU-PRINCE -- Haitian government officials say they are still looking for earthquake survivors, despite earlier reports that they had called off search and rescue efforts.

``There has been a misinterpretation of the president's declaration,'' Haitian Minister of Communications Marie Laurence Lassegue told The Miami Herald.

Another spokesman said the government has not ended search and rescue efforts. Haitian officials are waiting for experts to deliver a letter to President René Préval before making a decision.

Earlier Saturday, the Associated Press, citing a United Nations statement released Friday, reported that Haiti's government had declared its search and rescue phase for survivors over.

AFP

Scientologists 'heal' Haiti quake victims using touch

By Charles Onians (AFP) – 22 hours ago

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Amid the mass of aid agencies piling in to help Haiti quake victims is a batch of Church of Scientology "volunteer ministers", claiming to use the power of touch to reconnect nervous systems.

Clad in yellow T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of the controversial US-based group, smiling volunteers fan out among the injured lying under makeshift shelters in the courtyard of Port-au-Prince's General Hospital.

A wealthy private donor provided his airplane to fly in 80 volunteers from Los Angeles, along with 50 Haitian-American-doctors, in a gesture worth 400,000 dollars, said a Parisian volunteer who gave her name as Sylvie.

"We're trained as volunteer ministers, we use a process called 'assist' to follow the nervous system to reconnect the main points, to bring back communication," she said.

"When you get a sudden shock to a part of your body the energy gets stuck, so we re-establish communication within the body by touching people through their clothes, and asking people to feel the touch."

From NY TImes Blog report

Update | 6:49 p.m. It appears that the Scientologist flight to Haiti that was allowed to land this week while planes carrying medical supplies to major aid organizations were turned away may have been arranged by John Travolta. The actor told Entertainment Tonight earlier this week: “I have arranged for a plane to take down some volunteer ministers and some supplies and some medics. My church has also arranged for 80 medics and 33 volunteers to go down."

Response to global crisis according to cult mouthpiece:

Us according to us

In addition to Touch Assists, the Volunteer Ministers have been offering free stress tests to rescue personnel and citizens alike.

When disaster strikes, the Scientology Volunteer Ministers are always somewhere nearby. Trained to respond to emergency situations, they provide Touch Assists to immediately alleviate suffering and bring order quickly. And because the technology they apply is simple and affective, they quickly train others so they too can provide help. As the world's largest volunteer relief agency, over 230,000 strong and spanning every continent of this planet, there are more than twenty times as many Scientology Volunteer Ministers as there are people in the US Peace Corps; more than four times as many as are in the US Coast Guard; and about the same number as are in the US Marine Corps. Scientology Volunteer Ministers work hand-in-hand with the Red Cross, the Girl Scouts of America, the Fire Department of New York and other key agencies, to provide assistance where it is needed. Volunteer Ministers bring order and ensure maximum help in times of disaster, including earthquakes, tsunamis and especially volcano eruptions. In point of fact, Scientology Volunteer Ministers are the only people on the planet who can provide true assistance when disaster strikes.

I'd quote more but I have a distinctly "clear" need to upchuck.

Infections taking hold of survivors in Haiti’s squalor

The Boston Globe, By Stephen Smith, January 27

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Two weeks after a massive earthquake leveled much of this impoverished city, a wave of new infections and injuries has emerged, further taxing the nation’s shattered health care system.

Patients whose wounds were treated in the chaotic days following the quake are now returning with deep infections, the legacy of squalid conditions that make it impossible to keep open sores clean.

Rashes and gastrointestinal ailments, byproducts of the lack of clean water and sanitation, are becoming more common. And daily life on streets littered with rubble and marked by hopelessness is exacting a toll, as careering vehicles strike pedestrians and sprays of buckshot inflict wounds.

The shifting trajectory of suffering in Haiti is visible at a disaster field hospital staffed largely by medical workers from New England. Inside a taupe tent, an 18-year-old spiraled downward swiftly over the weekend.