People Buried In Haiti Pose Challenge For Rescuers

A U.S.-led rescue effort brought ships, mobile hospitals and food to Haiti after the prime minister said the earthquake two days ago that devastated Port-au-Prince may have killed more than 100,000 people.

The United Nations and international aid groups said time is running out to save thousands of people trapped beneath collapsed buildings in the capital by the country’s worst quake in more than a century. President Rene Preval said his nation, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest, has been “destroyed.”

“People buried under the rubble are still alive,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said yesterday. “We must save as many as possible. The most urgent need is for emergency search and rescue teams.” “The first needs are for food, shelter and water, the absolute basics,” said David Humphries, a spokesman in Washington for CHF International, an aid group with 170 members in Haiti and a four-year budget of $104 million from the United States Agency for International Development.

In Port-au-Prince, a city of about 2 million, bodies are heaped along streets and corpses of small children piled outside schools as flies begin to gather, the Associated Press reported. The UN said clean water is lacking and hotels, hospitals and the national penitentiary suffered extensive damage, as did the offices of UN peacekeeping forces and the presidential palace.