But hour by hour the unmet needs of hundreds of thousands grew. “Have we been abandoned? Where is the food?’’ shouted one man, Jean Michel Jeantet, in a downtown street.
The UN World Food Program said it expected to boost operations from feeding 67,000 people on Sunday to 97,000 yesterday. But it needs 100 million prepared meals over the next 30 days, and it appealed for more government donations.
“I know that aid cannot come soon enough,’’ UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in New York after returning from Haiti. He urged officials to “unplug the bottlenecks.’’
Ban asked for 1,500 more UN police and 2,000 more peacekeepers to join the 9,000 or so UN security personnel in Haiti. The Security Council was expected to approve the reinforcements tomorrow.
In one step to reassure frustrated aid groups, the US military agreed to give aid deliveries priority over military flights at the now-US-run airport here, the WFP announced in Rome. The Americans’ handling of civilian flights had angered some humanitarian officials.
The US Air Force itself resorted to an air drop of aid. A C-17 parachuted pallets of food and water into an area outside Port-au-Prince secured by US forces. The Americans have been reluctant to use air drops for fear of drawing unruly crowds
Sunday’s looting and violence raged into yesterday, as hundreds clambered over the broken walls of shops to grab anything they could, including toothpaste, now valuable for lining nostrils against the stench of Port-au-Prince’s dead. Police fired into the air as young men fought each other over rum and beer with broken bottles and machetes.
Hard-pressed medical teams sometimes had to take time away from quake victims to deal with gunshot wounds, said Loris de Filippi of Doctors Without Borders. In the Montrissant neighborhood, Red Cross doctors, saying they “cannot cope,’’ worked in shipping containers and lost 50 patients over two days, said international Red Cross spokesman Simon Schorno.
The latest casualty report, from the European Commission citing Haitian government figures, doubled previous estimates of the dead from the magnitude-7.0 quake, to approximately 200,000, with about 70,000 bodies recovered and trucked off to mass graves.
