Haiti quake worst disaster ever: UN
The Haiti earthquake is the worst disaster the United Nations has ever faced, a spokeswoman with the organisation has declared.
The situation has been exacerbated by the damage done to UN and state services in the country, much of which was demolished, said UN official Elisabeth Byrs, adding: "Everything is damaged."
In that way, it is worse than the cataclysmic Asian tsunami of 2004, she said in Geneva.
The death toll remains unknown. Haiti's government alone has already recovered 20,000 bodies, not counting those recovered by independent agencies or relatives themselves, said Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive.
In a fresh estimate, the Pan American Health Organisation said 50,000 to 100,000 people perished in the quake. Mr Bellerive said 100,000 would "seem to be the minimum" as truckloads of corpses were being trundled to mass graves.
Meanwhile, precious water and food supplies began to reach parched and hungry earthquake survivors on the streets of shattered Port-au-Prince, where despair at times turned into a frenzy among the ruins.
"People are so desperate for food that they are going crazy," said accountant Henry Ounche, in a crowd of hundreds who fought one another as US military helicopters clattered overhead carrying aid.
About 200 youths began brawling to get at supplies when other Navy helicopters dropped rations and Gatorade into a football stadium thronged with refugees. Across the hilly, steamy city, where people choked on the stench of death, hope faded by the hour for finding many more victims alive in the rubble, more than four days after Tuesday's catastrophic earthquake.
Yet the occasional murmur of buried victims spurred rescue crews on, even as aftershocks threatened to finish off crumbling buildings. "No one's alive in there," a woman sobbed outside the wrecked Montana Hotel. But hope would not die. "We can hear a survivor," search crew chief Alexander Luque of Namibia later reported as his men dug on.
Elsewhere, an American team pulled a woman alive from a collapsed university building where she had been trapped for 97 hours.
The Haiti earthquake is the worst disaster the United Nations has ever faced, a spokeswoman with the organisation has declared.
The situation has been exacerbated by the damage done to UN and state services in the country, much of which was demolished, said UN official Elisabeth Byrs, adding: "Everything is damaged."
In that way, it is worse than the cataclysmic Asian tsunami of 2004, she said in Geneva.
The death toll remains unknown. Haiti's government alone has already recovered 20,000 bodies, not counting those recovered by independent agencies or relatives themselves, said Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive.
In a fresh estimate, the Pan American Health Organisation said 50,000 to 100,000 people perished in the quake. Mr Bellerive said 100,000 would "seem to be the minimum" as truckloads of corpses were being trundled to mass graves.
Meanwhile, precious water and food supplies began to reach parched and hungry earthquake survivors on the streets of shattered Port-au-Prince, where despair at times turned into a frenzy among the ruins.
"People are so desperate for food that they are going crazy," said accountant Henry Ounche, in a crowd of hundreds who fought one another as US military helicopters clattered overhead carrying aid.
About 200 youths began brawling to get at supplies when other Navy helicopters dropped rations and Gatorade into a football stadium thronged with refugees. Across the hilly, steamy city, where people choked on the stench of death, hope faded by the hour for finding many more victims alive in the rubble, more than four days after Tuesday's catastrophic earthquake.
Yet the occasional murmur of buried victims spurred rescue crews on, even as aftershocks threatened to finish off crumbling buildings. "No one's alive in there," a woman sobbed outside the wrecked Montana Hotel. But hope would not die. "We can hear a survivor," search crew chief Alexander Luque of Namibia later reported as his men dug on.
Elsewhere, an American team pulled a woman alive from a collapsed university building where she had been trapped for 97 hours.
