Survivors of the Haitian earthquake are leaving the devastated capital city. Some of its inhabitants have managed to leave on trucks that belong to the UN. Many are leaving the city in search of food, water and medicine. Aid has been slow to reach people because of bottlenecks caused by poor infrastructure. In an effort to get more supplies into the country, America has been given control of the airport in Port-au-Prince.
There have been ugly scenes at aid distribution points, as people fight for whatever is available. There have also been widespread reports of violence and looting as desperate people search for food and water.
The UN’s World Food Programme has set up four aid distribution sites in the capital. The organisation is giving out special biscuits, but the people do not realise the biscuits are different. One aid worker said: “They don’t understand these are high energy biscuits fortified with vitamins with an expiry date of November 2010.”
The estimated death toll now stands at 140,000, and managing the bodies is one of the top health priorities. Morgues were filled up early on. 40,000 bodies have been buried in mass graves. Now some Haitians are taking matters into their own hands and burning the bodies on rubbish tips along with other waste.
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CNN’s Anderson Cooper, reporting Friday from a mass grave on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, described seeing hundreds of bodies mixed with garbage in open pits. Some bodies were bulldozed into the half-filled pits.
“These people will vanish,” Cooper said in a phone report. “No one will know what happened to them. That’s one of the many horrors.
“There’s no system in place here. Literally these people here are being collected off the streets, dumped into a dump truck, then brought out here and dumped in the pits,” he said.
Mass graves, it warned, are “not justified on public health grounds. Rushing to dispose of bodies without proper identification traumatizes families and communities and may have serious legal consequences.”
I am in Port-au-Prince and there is no way to find the living, let alone the dead. Thousands are entombed above the Port-au-Prince water table. Bodies must be burned in order to avoid an outbreak of cholera that will cost thousands of lives.
The logistics of viewing bodies is impossible and having a few thousand rotting corpses sitting around, after a few days in a hot climate, is staggering. Already the smell is strong and will get much stronger.
We do not have the luxury of refrigerated morgues. We do not have the luxury of electrical power today, so simple fridges are relics of a forgotten past.
Worry about the living. The dead are gone somewhere else.