200,000 flee Port-au-Prince; agencies try to house the rest
Source: Agencies |
January 23, 2010, Saturday
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HAITIANS are fleeing their quake-ravaged capital by the hundreds of thousands, aid officials said yesterday, as their government promised to help nearly a half-million more move from squalid camps on curbsides and vacant lots into safer, cleaner tent cities.
Aid officials said some 200,000 people have crammed into buses, nearly swamped ferries and set out even on foot to escape the ruined capital. For those who stay, foreign engineers have started leveling land on the fringes of the city for tent cities, supposedly temporary, that are meant to house 400,000 people.
The goal is to halt the spread of disease at hundreds of impromptu settlements that have no water and no place for sewage. Homeless families have erected tarps and tents, cardboard and scrap as shelter from the sun, but they will be useless once the summer rainy season hits.
The new camps "are going to be going to places where they will have at least some adequate facilities," Fritz Longchamp, chief of staff to President Rene Preval, said on Thursday.
Rescue crews began abandoning hope of finding the final survivors of the magnitude-7.0 quake on January 12. Thursday was the first day since the quake in which nobody was pulled alive from the ruins, UN mission spokesman David Wimhurst said.
Armies of foreign aid donors, instead, turned their attention to expanding their pipeline of food, water and medical care for survivors.
With extensive swaths of Port-au-Prince in ruins, more than 500 makeshift settlements with a population of about 472,000 are now scattered around the capital, said Jean-Philippe Chauzy, spokesman for the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration.
Longchamp said he expects buses to start moving quake refugees to the first of the planned camps by the end of the month, but aid agencies were cautious about that timetable.
"These settlements cannot be built overnight. There are standards that have to be designed by experts. There is the leveling of the land, procurement and delivery of tents, as well as water and sanitation," said Vincent Houver, the IOM's mission chief in Haiti.
Many people are just trying to get out of the capital, often back to the farms or provincial homes of their parents or relatives.
The United States Agency for International Development said yesterday that as many as 200,000 Haitians have fled the capital and many more are trying to do so.
Computer teacher Daniel Dukenson walked across the capital to catch a bus to take his family from their collapsed home to crowd in with a cousin in the seaside town of St Marc, a two-hour journey away. "I'd like to go back, but it's going to take a lot of time for Port-au-Prince to get back on its feet. Two years, maybe," said the 28-year-old.
A USAID report suggests that at least 100,000 people have fled to Gonaives, a city of about 280,000 that itself is still recovering from back-to-back hurricanes in 2008.
The flight is a reversal of decades of migration out of a countryside where deforestation and erosion have impoverished the land.
Still others have tried to flee abroad. The US Embassy yesterday turned away hundreds of people seeking a trip out on the planes that have dropped off aid. Scores of US citizens were given passes, but many were told officials were overwhelmed and they would have to return later.
Haiti's government estimates the January 12 quake killed 200,000 people. It said 250,000 people were injured and 2 million homeless in the nation of 9 million.
Aid officials said some 200,000 people have crammed into buses, nearly swamped ferries and set out even on foot to escape the ruined capital. For those who stay, foreign engineers have started leveling land on the fringes of the city for tent cities, supposedly temporary, that are meant to house 400,000 people.
The goal is to halt the spread of disease at hundreds of impromptu settlements that have no water and no place for sewage. Homeless families have erected tarps and tents, cardboard and scrap as shelter from the sun, but they will be useless once the summer rainy season hits.
The new camps "are going to be going to places where they will have at least some adequate facilities," Fritz Longchamp, chief of staff to President Rene Preval, said on Thursday.
Rescue crews began abandoning hope of finding the final survivors of the magnitude-7.0 quake on January 12. Thursday was the first day since the quake in which nobody was pulled alive from the ruins, UN mission spokesman David Wimhurst said.
Armies of foreign aid donors, instead, turned their attention to expanding their pipeline of food, water and medical care for survivors.
With extensive swaths of Port-au-Prince in ruins, more than 500 makeshift settlements with a population of about 472,000 are now scattered around the capital, said Jean-Philippe Chauzy, spokesman for the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration.
Longchamp said he expects buses to start moving quake refugees to the first of the planned camps by the end of the month, but aid agencies were cautious about that timetable.
"These settlements cannot be built overnight. There are standards that have to be designed by experts. There is the leveling of the land, procurement and delivery of tents, as well as water and sanitation," said Vincent Houver, the IOM's mission chief in Haiti.
Many people are just trying to get out of the capital, often back to the farms or provincial homes of their parents or relatives.
The United States Agency for International Development said yesterday that as many as 200,000 Haitians have fled the capital and many more are trying to do so.
Computer teacher Daniel Dukenson walked across the capital to catch a bus to take his family from their collapsed home to crowd in with a cousin in the seaside town of St Marc, a two-hour journey away. "I'd like to go back, but it's going to take a lot of time for Port-au-Prince to get back on its feet. Two years, maybe," said the 28-year-old.
A USAID report suggests that at least 100,000 people have fled to Gonaives, a city of about 280,000 that itself is still recovering from back-to-back hurricanes in 2008.
The flight is a reversal of decades of migration out of a countryside where deforestation and erosion have impoverished the land.
Still others have tried to flee abroad. The US Embassy yesterday turned away hundreds of people seeking a trip out on the planes that have dropped off aid. Scores of US citizens were given passes, but many were told officials were overwhelmed and they would have to return later.
Haiti's government estimates the January 12 quake killed 200,000 people. It said 250,000 people were injured and 2 million homeless in the nation of 9 million.
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