Haiti Quake Updates

Troops, doctors and aid workers are flowing into Haiti, while nations pledge millions of dollars in aid. But how do you handle a crisis of this magnitude? Richard Gordon and Mike Evans of the Bournemouth University Disaster Management Centre, outline the planning and potential pitfalls of such an operation. Read the Full Article>>>

To prepare for future disasters, Mr. Clinton said he planned to suggest that the United Nations consider stockpiling latrines and other sanitation supplies in disaster- or conflict-prone areas around the world, much as it already does with medical supplies, food and water.

He said he believed that the United Nations and the international community needed to devise plans for handling natural disasters and conduct practice exercises to improve coordination and diminish response time.

Mr. Clinton was given the added responsibility on Wednesday of overseeing United Nations aid efforts and reconstruction in Haiti after the magnitude 7 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince, the capital, and surrounding areas on Jan. 12.

Dr. Paul Farmer, the deputy special envoy to Haiti who toured the clinic with Mr. Clinton, said: “For sanitation and health, the key is going to be to create community-based solutions, which basically means hire Haitians and lots of them to begin tracking infectious diseases, doing follow-up on treatments, as well as building latrines and water infrastructure. It shouldn’t be seen as some radical notion that we need to inject the money into the Haitian population, because they are the ones who can actually do the follow up.”

United Nations officials echoed the concerns over sanitation and health. “The rainy season is going to make our sanitation problems become our water problems if we don’t find a way to get more latrines built,” said Souleymane Sow, coordinator for Unicef’s water, sanitation and health cluster. “The rain will wash the waste into the area where people are living and may cause people to become very sick.”

More than 900 pit or trench latrines have been dug. But sanitation facilities are still needed for more than 950,000 people, Mr. Sow said. He added that more donations of services and latrines were still needed from sanitation companies in the United States.

At a sweltering encampment on Toussaint Louverture Boulevard, about a mile from the Port-au-Prince airport, Pierre Toutiane nodded in agreement about the need for more latrines. He stood in his shanty, which is crowded on three sides by other shanties and which opens on the fourth side onto a gulley flowing with human waste. Just inches from the gulley, Mr. Toutiane’s 3-year-old son, Christian, lay on the shanty’s dirt floor.

“Every day that trench gets wider and closer to us,” Mr. Toutiane said. “But we have no place else to go.”

MONTREAL (AP) -- An effective recovery strategy for Haiti must take into account a sudden rush of thousands of quake survivors from Port-au-Prince into the countryside, where the economy cannot sustain them, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday.

Clinton, speaking to reporters during a break in a daylong conference intended to review and improve the delivery of short-term aid as well as chart a course for long-term recovery, said she was encouraged by the analysis of Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. He told the conference that the exodus from Port-au-Prince has added a new twist to the post-quake challenge.

"The distribution of people (and) their needs have changed," Bellerive said. "We have to reassess the whole country," in terms of job creation and requirements for housing.

At a closing news conference, Clinton said the U.S. would host an international donors conference for Haitian relief in March at U.N. headquarters in New York.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) -- More than 111,000 people died in last week's massive earthquake in Haiti, the government announced, even as it officially ended the search-and-rescue phase of its response to the disaster.

The government's figure, released by the United Nations late Friday, is the first precise death toll for the magnitude 7.0 quake that struck on January 12. It said 111,481 people were confirmed dead.

It is the worst death toll from an earthquake since the 2004 Asian tsunami, and the second-highest death toll from an earthquake in more than three decades, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Some 609,000 people have also been left homeless in and around the capital of Port-au-Prince, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said.

"I had the idea to say to people: 'Don't panic. We are Oxfam. We help people,' " the group's Haiti director said.

But this time, it was Oxfam that needed help. One of its top officials was pinned beneath the rubble in the agency's compound, fatally injured. Cellphones were dead. Roads were blocked. And when Etienne made it home, she found her elderly mother crushed under a collapsed wall.

The United Nations and aid groups are trying to run a relief operation for 3 million people while coping with missing staff and family members, damaged warehouses and files buried in shattered buildings. Workers are battling the logistical complications through a fog of grief.

The United Nations was particularly hard hit. Its two top officials in Haiti died in the collapse of the six-story Christopher Hotel, which the agency had rented to use as its local headquarters.

There is no audio for about the first 10 seconds, but it starts after that, so be patient.  Also, the volume is a bit low at points so turn up the volume on your computer.

The U.N. Secretary General says the facts are "grim" in Haiti, after a 7.0 earthquake rocked the Caribbean nation Tuesday.  Ban Ki-moon warned that the overall death toll could be very high. Among the scores of dead, at least 36 U.N. military and civilian staff. But that figure could rise dramatically, as some 150 personnel are still unaccounted for nearly 48 hours after the quake.

Mr. Ban told reporters that the overall picture on the ground in Haiti still remains "sketchy".

He said the first 72 hours are critical in saving survivors, and he is still holding out hope for both Haitians and U.N. personnel trapped beneath the rubble.

Q: Can you tell us about the casualties. I'm sorry but we need to start with that. Do you have any figures?

Le Roy: We don't have any figures for the time being. But we know clearly it is a tragedy for Haiti, and a tragedy for the UN, and especially for the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti – the MINUSTAH. The only figures we have are the figures of MINUSTAH. All together, we are more than 9,000 uniformed personnel, 490 international civilian personnel, and 1,200 local civilian staff, and 200 United Nations Volunteers. And I didn't mention, among the troops are 7,000 troops and 2,000 policemen. That is the total figure of MINUSTAH.

As far as we know, the main building that was the Headquarters building called the Hotel Christopher has collapsed. As far as we speak, some of our troops – mostly Brazilian troops – are surrounding the building and trying to rescue the people from the main headquarters. As we speak, no-one has been rescued from this main headquarters, but we don't know how many people were in the building when the collapse happened. It happened a little after five o'clock, and we don't know how many people were in the building at the time, so we don't have any number of casualties for the time being.

The Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping said that contacts with the UN on the ground have been severely hampered as communications networks in Haiti have been disabled by the quake.

“For the moment, a large number of personnel remain unaccounted for,” Alain Le Roy said in a statement.

He added that the headquarters of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) in Port-au-Prince has sustained serious damage along with other UN installations.

“The Department of Peacekeeping Operations is still in the process of gathering information on the extent of the damage and the status of UN personnel,” stated Mr. Le Roy.

MINUSTAH was set up in 2004 and currently has more than 9,000 military and police personnel and nearly 2,000 civilian staff.