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As thousands of bodies piled up in the streets decomposing in the heat, fear and anger spread through the city. One United Nations truck trying to deliver food had to pull away as it was mobbed by a crowd. Bands of young men, some armed, roamed the streets looking for food and water.
Hundreds of bodies were stacked outside the city morgue, and limbs of the dead protruded from the rubble of crushed schools and homes. A few workers were able to free people who had been trapped under the rubble for days, but others attended to the grim task of using bulldozers to transport loads of bodies. For the survivors, worries turned to a possible outbreak of diseases including malaria.
Haitian President Rene Preval told The Miami Herald that over a 20-hour period government crews had removed 7,000 corpses from the streets and morgues and buried them in mass graves. The International Red Cross estimated that up to 50,000 people were killed in the quake.
The U.N. World Food Program (WFP) said post-quake looting of its food supplies long stored in Port-au-Prince appears to have been limited, contrary to an earlier report Friday. It said it would start handing out 6,000 tons of food aid recovered from a damaged warehouse in the city's Cite Soleil slum.
A spokeswoman for the Rome-based agency, Emilia Casella, said the WFP was preparing shipments of enough ready-to-eat meals to feed 2 million Haitians for a month.
Still, getting relief to the people has been a nightmare.
Relief groups on the border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti carrying medical supplies Friday turned around to await military escorts after hearing reports of violence along the route to the capital, said Rahul Singh, director of the relief group Global Medic .
Haitian refugees overwhelmed a tiny local hospital in the border town of Jimani with injuries ranging from cuts and bruises to serious crush injuries, such as a broken pelvis. Some of the wounds had become gangrenous because the victims had not been able to get medical care.
"We've been getting people for the last two days, but no one is going out to the regional hospitals. We are overcrowded. We need ambulances," said Abel Gonzales, a general surgeon from Santo Domingo. Patients lay moaning on the floor of the emergency clinic as Gonzales pleaded with military officials to airlift a young boy to Santo Domingo.
"Nobody knows what they are doing," said Mike Howett, a general surgeon from Canada who is volunteering with Global Medics.
President Obama warned Friday that it will take a long time to restore a semblance of order in the devastated nation. "There are going to be many difficult days ahead," Obama said at the White House. "So many people are in need of assistance."
Obama has said the scale of the relief effort will be one of the largest in recent history. He promised a $100 million relief effort in response to Tuesday's magnitude-7.0 quake, which has left the hemisphere's poorest nation without basic services such as water and power, much less a functioning government.
On Friday, he called Preval and again pledged his support for Haiti's recovery and rebuilding effort. Preval told Obama he was touched by the friendship of Americans and "from the bottom of my heart and on behalf of the Haitian people, thank you, thank you, thank you."
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said up to 10,000 U.S. troops will be in Haiti or off its shores by Monday to distribute aid and prevent potential rioting among desperate earthquake survivors.
World Vision, an international relief agency, worked to find water and food on the island to deliver to victims. Workers in the Port au Prince office prepared bags of clothing and shoes for 140 families as part of kits they hoped would include food and water.
As of Friday afternoon, no supplies had been delivered. The agency has a day's worth of medical supplies left. It is awaiting its first flight of relief supplies, 18 metric tons of blankets, tarps and medicince, said spokeswoman Laura Blank.
The flight is expected Friday afternoon. She said the agency hopes to begin its first mass distribution Saturday at two makeshift camps.
"It's a good start, but we don't have a lot of margin for error," she said. "We still need more resources."
Fuel, she said, is quickly becoming a problem. In the few gas stations open, motorists wait on long lines. The agency is bringing fuel in from the Dominican Republic. "We have vehicles, but no gasoline," Blank said.
World Vision also has plans to open a field hospital in Jimani. "The extent that we have to go through, that we have to go to the border, is telling us of the struggle here to provide aid," Blank said.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Mmoon said Friday that up to 50% of the buildings in Haiti's capital and other areas hardest hit by the earthquake have been damaged or destroyed. The U.N. chief said the United Nations will launch an emergency appeal later Friday for $550 million to provide food, water, shelter and other essentials for millions of Haitians.
The first of 800 paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division who arrived in Haiti late Thursday began handing out food, water and medical supplies to Haitians outside the airport. A helicopter left the airport with water to distribute, and a reconnaissance helicopter is looking for dropping zones around the capital to move out more aid, said the unit's commander, Capt. Mike Anderson.
Military cargo planes were en route from New Jersey carrying tents and forklifts. Planes from the United States and other countries landed at Toussaint L'Ouverture International Airport carrying searchers and tons of water, food and medicine.
The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson arrived off Haiti's shores overnight carrying 19 helicopters, and it started flights off its deck Friday morning, officials said. The carrier has water-purifying equipment and three surgical operating rooms and can do medical evacuations as well as ferry supplies and people to and from land.
The Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort was to leave Baltimore on Saturday with some 250 medical staff, stop in Florida to pick up 300 more people and be off the coast of Haiti by Thursday.
Doctors at the Hospital de l'Universite d'Etat D'Haiti were amputating limbs on the street outside because they feared the walls of the building might collapse, manager Guy LaRoche said.
LaRoche said there had been no help from the Haitian government.
"We are still waiting," he said. Only 20 out of the hospital's 158 doctors were on duty, he said. Many were caring for their own families — or were missing.
Violaine Bernardin, 39, was standing next to a pile of hundreds of corpses outside the the city's largest hospital. She had come to search for the remains of her four children, but quickly gave up, overwhelmed by the macabre scene.
"I know they are gone," she said. "Anybody who made it out stayed in the neighborhood."
Elsewhere, people used pieces of wood to claim patches of sidewalk, desperate for a safe spot for their families to sleep.
Osley Bellegarde was trying to keep his family sheltered from a thick cake of dust thrown off by thousands of collapsed buildings, a dust that seems to cover everything. "Tell the world we need help," he said. "Help and many prayers."
The world was trying to heed his call. The USA's largest group of nurses, National Nurses United, said it had more than 4,000 volunteers eager to travel to Haiti to provide assistance.
They were told by the White House there was no way to accommodate them until at least the weekend, said Rose Ann DeMoro, the group's executive director. "It's incredibly frustrating," she said.
Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman, said the government was grateful for offers of help but does not yet have the facilities to house, feed and protect all potential volunteers. He said search and rescue efforts were the immediate priority.
"Right now, bottom line, the most helpful assistance you can provide (relief groups) is cash," Vietor said.
Scant medical care
Almost three days after the quake, it seemed the suffering was getting worse.
Juilie Exile arrived at the hospital carrying a lethargic, 7-month-old baby covered in dust with red, swollen eyes. She said the boy, Billy, was found by neighbors as they dug through rubble looking for their own relatives.
Billy barely moved or opened his eyes. The boy's father was killed in the quake, Exile said.
Nadia Charles and her husband, Jerome, hadn't eaten since they arrived at the hospital on Tuesday with their injured 1-year-old son, whom they had pulled out of the rubble.
No food was available because street vendors were displaced by the earthquake, she said. People were fighting over the little food that was available, she said.
"Even if I wanted to buy water, there is no water to buy," Charles said.
The couple said their child hadn't had any pain medication. They were provided with an IV but no one had put it in, so it was next to the child, unused.
Elsewhere, Greg and Barbara Van Schoyck, American missionaries with the Haitian American Friendship Foundation, had been traveling the countryside, offering food, water and medical care.
"We were seeing huge gashes and injuries that really would require sutures and advanced medical care," Greg Van Schoyck said. "All we could do was clean them and put on ointments and give Band-Aids — and (people) were lined down the block just for that."
Woudson Lerantus, 4, was lying on the ground with both legs in casts, looking wide-eyed at the activity around him.
"He was at home, lying on the floor watching television, and the earth started shaking violently," said his father, Jocelyn Lerantus. "He cried a lot. It took me about 30 minutes to get the blocks off him."
The absence of heavy moving equipment, such as bulldozers, continued to be a major problem. Bernardin said no one in her neighborhood was trying to dig through rubble for survivors "because it's too hard."
Grady Bray, a disaster psychologist who has worked in several tragedies abroad, said rescue workers soon would have to begin making tough decisions about who to help — and who would have to be left to die.
"At this stage, you've got to focus on the people who can be saved," Bray said.
'We've had to ration'
The feeling of helplessness reverberated back to the USA, where James Hauser, a minister in Louisville, was receiving text messages from his father, Bill, who was on a mission trip to Haiti when the quake hit.
"We delivered a baby ... a baby died ... a young student was brought in and left for dead," the messages read.
DeMoro said reports from Haiti indicated that dengue fever, malaria and even measles already are on the rise.
"I haven't seen this many dead bodies in one place in a very long time," said Margaret Aguirre, a spokeswoman for International Medical Corps, a relief organization.
In part because of Haiti's poor infrastructure, which was in tatters before the quake, more people could die during the aftermath than from the tremor itself, Bray said.
Bob Poff, director of disaster services for the Salvation Army, said the staff at its children's home in the Delmas section of Port-au-Prince had run out of water, medical supplies and food. Poff and his wife care for 50 children at the school.
"We've had to ration what we had to make it go as far as we can, and do without," Poff said. "We have no drinking water."
Dave Toycen, president of aid group World Vision Canada, says water, medicines and shelter supplies "are critically low."
Indeed, while many Haitians were waiting patiently for assistance, others were starting to take matters into their own hands.
U.N. peacekeepers guarded against trouble from Haiti's armed gangs, which virtually ruled the country after a rebellion in 2004.
Looting was likely to become an even bigger problem in days ahead as people run out of basic supplies, Bray said.
"For these folks, it's not money that's power right now. It's food and water and maybe electricity," he said.
That didn't deter charitable groups. CARE said it was collaborating with the World Food Program to airlift 86 metric tons of biscuits into Haiti, enough for a half-million emergency meals.
Exile, who brought in the sick baby, said that until more help arrived, Haitians would just have to rely on each other. For now, she said, "it's only neighbors helping neighbors."
Revehl is a reporter for The (Fort Myers) News-Press. Winter reported from McLean, Va. Also contributing: Donna Leinwand on the border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti; Carolyn Pesce, Oren Dorell, Richard Wolf, Peter Smith of the (Louisville) Courier-Journal, the Associated Press.
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