PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — As new waves of American troops prepared to land in this battered nation on Monday, rescue workers and military teams already on the ground worked to quicken the delivery of aid to hundreds of thousands of Haitians growing increasingly desperate for food and clean water.
The United Nations World Food Program said it planned to distribute 200 tons of food aid on Monday to 95,000 people at eight locations and appealed anew for public donations to the relief effort. The calls for more help came even as aid workers, mobile clinics and other supplies continued to arrive at the airport and overland from the Dominican Republic.
Former President Bill Clinton, the United Nations special envoy to Haiti, was also expected to arrive later in the day.
More United Nations peacekeepers were visible on the streets of the capital Monday morning after reports of a rash of lootings and shootings a day earlier. Buses packed with refugees continued to stream out of the city as people gambled that they had a better chance of finding food and shelter in the countryside.
As scavengers looked for metal in the rubble, rescue teams continued their search for survivors despite dwindling odds and rising tallies of the dead. The Haitian prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, told ABC News that 70,000 bodies had been found, and a top American commander in Haiti said Sunday that “we are going to have to be prepared for the worst.”
In an interview with ABC’s “This Week,” Lt. Gen. P. K. Keen was asked about estimates numbering the dead at 150,000 to 200,000. He called those figures a “start point,” but said there were still no exact casualty counts.
On Sunday, the mood managed to stay mostly calm, as residents carried leather-bound Bibles to pray outside their ruined churches. There were fewer bodies in the streets, though in some places residents began burning corpses left behind.
Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, arrived to offer a promise of improvement from his organization, which was itself badly hit by the quake but was still heavily criticized for the slow pace of the emergency response.
“I am here with a message of hope that help is on the way,” Mr. Ban told a crowd of Haitians in front of the severely damaged National Palace.
On the fifth day after the earthquake, there were signs of improvement, possibly even hope that the worst was passing. Traffic at the airport continued to increase, and there were 27 rescue teams on the ground, with 1,500 people searching for survivors.
But the World Food Program said, “Aftershocks persist, which is a concern given the damaged infrastructure.”
The best news came in the form of a small voice from deep in a pile of rubble at the Caribbean Supermarket in the Delmas neighborhood, heard overnight late Saturday or early Sunday. As the odds of finding more survivors fell steeply, American and Turkish rescue workers were stunned to discover a small Haitian girl, who proudly told them that she made it through with hope and leathery fruit snacks.
She was the first of five people to be pulled from the wreckage during a search spanning the weekend, some of whom sent desperate text messages to let loved ones know they were trapped. She was deeply shaken, having been trapped for days in a small space in a devastated market, with death in every aisle. But she had not been pinned down by debris and was not hurt, according to Capt. Joseph Zahralban of the South Florida search and rescue team.
“If you have to be trapped in a collapsed building, a stocked supermarket is probably the best place to be,” Captain Zahralban said.
Among the rescuers at the store were members of a joint New York police and fire rescue team, who had arrived in Haiti on Saturday, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly of New York said Sunday in a telephone interview. He said the team included 80 people and several rescue dogs.
There were several other reported rescues around the city, including a 2-month-old baby, CNN reported, and Jens Kristensen, a Danish civilian employee of the United Nations peacekeeping forces at the Christopher Hotel, the organization’s headquarters here, where perhaps 100 of its workers remained buried.
At the airport, American military officials said that waiting times for landing had declined, while traffic had increased. Each day, there are 100 slots for incoming planes — well exceeding the 30 to 35 flights that the airport handled before the earthquake. But in a sign of both Haiti’s needs and the response, even that is not close to handling the number of planes waiting to come in. “There is certainly more demand than 100 a day,” said Maj. Matthew Jones of the Air Force, operations officer of the joint task force running the airport. “However, no one has been denied a slot, but there may be a delay. Sometimes if it’s not today, it’s tomorrow.”
The military has established a priority list for providing slots, Major Jones said. At the top are planes bringing in water. Next is equipment for distributing supplies, followed by food and then medical personnel and medicine.
In Port-au-Prince, the stepped-up effort appeared to be paying off and aid was finally reaching at least some of Haiti’s desperate, with varying degrees of order.
On Sunday morning, a United Nations truck appeared in the park near the presidential palace, where hundreds of families have been squatting since the earthquake. They handed out bags of water to a crowd mostly appreciative, with only a little shoving.
The World Food Program also sent at least three convoys to different locations badly affected by the earthquake, with a goal of delivering enough nourishment to last 65,000 people five days.
But the scene at one delivery site suggested that the food — rations of fortified biscuits, each one about the size of a graham cracker — would hardly last the ravenous victims one night. And the agency’s distribution methods nearly started a riot when throngs of people who had lost everything mobbed one of the trucks in the convoy.
“It’s not their fault,” said Guerrier Ernso, looking on at the mob. “They are hungry.”
Mr. Ernso, a 25-year-old linguistics student, introduced himself to a World Food Program official and suggested that it might have been more effective if the agency had called ahead to advise community leaders that it was coming. Then he and four other brawny young men dived into the mob and began pulling people apart. Within five minutes the people had been arranged in three neat lines. “They have to create another way to deliver food,” Mr. Ernso said of the World Food Program official, speaking in English. “The way they are doing it now, they will not help us out of our misery.”
Meanwhile, Col. Cormi Bartal, a doctor in the Israeli Army’s newly established field hospital here, pulled back the flap of a tent serving as the hospital’s pediatric section and pointed to a woman, Guerlande Jean Michel, 24. She identified a sleeping newborn on her cot, one of the first born in the city after the earthquake, and spoke in a halting voice. “This is my child,” said Ms. Jean Michel, a primary school teacher. “His name is Israel.”
Colonel Bartal said the hospital had carried out amputations on 10 people, treated patients with burns on 70 percent of their bodies, and saved two people with gunshot wounds. “There are the injuries from the earthquake, but those are subsiding,” he explained. “Now we’re treating those affected by the aftermath, not from the earthquake.”
Still, away from where aid trucks happened to appear — no one seemed to know where or when to expect them — pressure has been building, and with President René Préval still holed up in a police station, without having made a national address, frustration with the government was growing. He and his cabinet held a meeting on Sunday on plastic chairs outside the station.
Signs popping up across the city called for the return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former president who was ousted in 2004, and even for the Duvaliers, who ruled the country brutally from the 1950s to the 1980s.
In the main market downtown, prices had skyrocketed. A small bottle of water cost $6. And residents have grown more desperate. “We need water,” said Joseph Jean René, a round man in a Hawaiian shirt standing near a scrum of money changers. “We are dying of thirst and hunger. Even the children are dying.”
Just a few blocks away, nearly a hundred sweaty young men with empty gasoline cans bunched together and shouted for their share of diesel. The pump could barely be seen because it was covered with people. “He already got some,” one shouted. Said another, “Come on, we’ve been here for two hours.” A security guard, thick as a tree, walked back and forth with a shotgun swinging in his left hand. The back of his blue T-shirt said in Creole, “If we put our hands together, life could be better.”
Violence and looting, unheard of just after the earthquake, also seemed to be spreading. Several reports of the police catching thieves and shooting them on the spot moved across the city, though at times, what happened and why were difficult to divine.
At the national cemetery, three new bodies appeared just after lunch, with wet blood on at least one of their faces. A fourth young man wearing Adidas high tops lay in a fetal position a few yards away on the sidewalk. Vomit and blood spread out from his chest.
Witnesses said they were thieves. “The police brought them here and shot them,” said Andre Pierre, 25. He stood over the fourth man, with a growing crowd. “He tried to fight the police,” said Maxime Nerestant, 22, a tae kwon do teacher with a shaved head and a beard. “ ‘Help me, help me,’ he said, ‘I’m innocent.’ ”
Suddenly, the man who was believed to be dead lifted his right arm. People asked him what happened, and where he was from. “La Lou,” he said quietly. A truck from Doctors Without Borders drove by. The crowd of Haitians did not notice, nor did they try to help the young man in his final moments. “The police shouldn’t kill innocent people, but with what’s happening in Haiti right now, people shouldn’t be stealing,” Mr. Nerestant said.
The police at the local precinct in the market area said they knew nothing of the theft or the shooting, though it occurred less than a mile away. Twelve of the station’s 29 officers were missing.
Pierrot Givens wore a hat and a black collarless shirt shiny as satin. He said that if there was more violence, it was because criminals from the prison had escaped. “There are a lot more bad people out there,” he said. “A lot of craziness.”
