Wednesday 20th January 2010
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
PHOTO: People sheltered from the rotor wash of an American helicopter carrying food and water in Léogâne, Haiti on Wednesday.
Published: January 20, 2010
LÉOGÂNE, Haiti — A strong aftershock struck near the Haitian capital on Wednesday morning, shaking buildings and spreading terror through the thousands of survivors who have been living outdoors since last week’s devastating
earthquake.
The aftershock, which had a magnitude 6.1, came around 6 a.m. and was centered on Gressier, a village west of the capital, Port-au-Prince. The most powerful to hit
Haiti since the initial earthquake eight days ago, it caused some additional damage to the ravaged capital; the
United Nations said it was trying to assess how much.
On the road to Léogâne, the badly damaged town that was the epicenter of the Jan. 12 earthquake and close to the heart of the Wednesday aftershock, it was hard to tell the new damage from the old. Some cracks on the paved, two-lane road from Port-Au-Prince were wider and deeper than they had been when a reporter drove them the day before. People put cinder blocks on the new fissures to warn drivers.
In Gressier, a small village outside the town that was said to be the epicenter, men worked on the rubble piles of their destroyed homes. They said there was little new damage, but weakened walls had finally given way.
“Most have been leaning,” said Ely Annaud, 42, a Gressier villager. “After this morning, they are totally gone.”
Asked if they were scared, a crowd of men around Mr. Annaud shout “oui, oui.”
“It was just so fast and so strong,” said Pierre Chermami, 47.
Speaking through an interpreter, he said matter-of-factly that he lost his wife and 22-year-old daughter here. The interpreter, who grew up nearby, said the calm was a kind of contract; if one cried, all would break down. “It is how they try to support each other, not to cry,” the interpreter said.
In the capital, Josette Lilas, a 25-year-old beautician, said she felt as if her heart had leaped into her throat when the shaking began. The shaking lasted several seconds, and the ground continued to move for at least a minute after — a calm swaying as if the capital were a ship in gentle swells.
“I thought this time, my good God, it was the end of the world,” said Josette Lilas, a 25-year-old beautician who has been sleeping in the street, bathing by the curb, hiding her disheveled hair beneath a shocking pink scarf. “I screamed and screamed. Then I realized it was over. I was still alive. Hallelujah.”
Survivors’ resilience remained undimmed.
Squatting on the sidewalk in central Port-au-Prince, her thigh bandaged from an injury suffered during the main quake, Ange Toussaint, 55, smiled broadly. “I’m here,” she said. “It happened again and I’m still here. Wow!”
Jean Michel Petithomme, 45, stood in the middle of Capois Street near downtown pointing to the cracks on his masonry home above an abandoned store-front pharmacy. He has not stayed in the house since the earthquake but returns daily to see if still stands, he said.
“That was one of the biggest aftershocks since the earthquake, but there have been many like it,” he said. “Those cracks are wider. I thought it would fall at last, but it is still there.”
Manno Dorsmond, a police officer who sleeps in his car, was bathing by the curb when the shaking broke a fissured wall, dropping a block of concrete on his shoulder.
“After 8 days, we thought it was over, and suddenly it was happening again,” said Mr. Dorsmond, 30. “Should we leave this land, say adios, bye bye, sayonara Haiti?” He said he was more angry than afraid.
“I am not afraid because the foreigners are calm,” Mr. Dorsmond said. “My people are screaming. But the foreigners who are risking their lives to help us are not scared. I will be like them.”
The village of Léogâne was bustling, with people walking in from surrounding villages because they heard that the
Marines who arrived Tuesday had food to give. In fact, the Marines were helping Catholic Relief Services distribute lentils, oil and bulgar supplied by the
United States Agency for International Development. The villagers walked off with hundred-pound sacks of the bulgar, not quite sure what to do with the unfamiliar grain. Sergio August, 25, walked from the town of Binola Point about 20 minutes away with a group of 25 people to find the Marines.
“You guys need to know it’s not just here that is damaged, the town back there is badly damaged,” he said, pointing back to Binola, a town that he estimated at 15,000 people. “We have gotten no help,” he said. “No one visits us.” Every so often, a bus or truck hurried by loaded with people fleeing to the hoped-for safety of the country side.
On Wednesday, the United States ordered another
2,000 Marines and 2,000 sailors to Haiti as expected, diverting an amphibious group of three ships. Some 11,500 U.S. military personal are in Haiti or offshore and 16,000 are expected by week’s end, according to a Pentagon spokesman, The Associated Press reported.
Signs of the international relief operation building here, underscoring the rising complaints that the Haitian government had all but disappeared in the week since a huge earthquake struck.
Haiti’s long history of foreign intervention, including an American occupation, normally makes the influx of foreigners a delicate issue. But with the government of President
René Préval largely out of public view and the needs so huge, many Haitians are shunting aside their concerns about sovereignty and welcoming anybody willing to help — in camouflage or not.
“It is not ideal to have a foreign army here, but look at the situation,” said Énide Edoword, 24, a waitress who was standing Tuesday in a camp of displaced people. “We are living amid filth and hunger and thirst after a catastrophe.”
Mr. Préval, an aloof leader even in the best of times, has been huddling with advisers at a compact police station that has become the government’s de-facto headquarters. Aides described him as being as traumatized by the recent events as every other Haitian but still fully engaged in the nation’s recovery.
They said he and his ministers were engaged in a furious effort to organize all the outside aid, find refuge for the hundreds of thousands of people living in the streets and bury bodies, thousands and thousands of which have been collected and put in mass graves. There is still no widely accepted death toll.
They said the president would soon address the nation for the first time since the quake struck on Jan. 12.
But the international effort has far outpaced anything Haiti could manage: supply flights from around the world continued to arrive in numbers, though aid groups complained of being turned away.
In Port-au-Prince, foreign rescue teams continued to scour buildings for survivors under the rubble.. Foreign doctors were providing medical care and carrying out scores of life-saving amputations.
But the demand for medical care far outstripped the supply of doctors. Debarati Guha-Sapir, a professor of epidemiology and the director of the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at the University of Louvain in Belgium, said in an interview on Tuesday that deaths in large earthquakes generally declined after the first day or two.
“Haiti, I think, is going to be a little different,” she said. “They will die simply because there is no care. People will die of wounds. They will die of lack of surgical care. They will die of simple trauma that in almost any other country would not lead to death.”
Elisabeth Delatour Préval, Haiti’s first lady, insisted that the country’s sovereignty remained intact, although she acknowledged that there was widespread concern among the population about whether the government was functioning, especially given the heavy damage sustained by the palace and other highly visible government buildings.
“Visually, people can’t see what they used to recognize as the symbols of the state,” she said in an interview on Tuesday. “That has generated some kind of panic. ‘Are they there or aren’t they there?’ ”
The American military, patrolled in Humvees up and down Boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the capital’s main commercial strip, took pains to reassure Haitians that the United States was in the country in a support role.
Meanwhile, 125 Marines arrived in helicopters on Tuesday in the damaged farming town of Léogâne, south of the capital, delivering cases of water and food.
At the same time, Col. Gregory Kane of the
United States Army told reporters at the Port-au-Prince airport that the Haitian government remained in charge. He said that United States forces were on the ground only to assist with the relief efforts.
“There have been some reports and news stories out there that the U.S. is invading Haiti,” Colonel Kane said. “We’re not invading Haiti. That’s ludicrous. This is humanitarian relief.”
Most Haitians seemed to see it that way, despite deep historic concerns about American troops in particular.
President Woodrow Wilson sent American Marines to Haiti in 1915 to restore public order after six different leaders ruled the country in quick succession, each killed or forced into exile. Opposition was intense, but it would be nearly two decades before the Marines would leave, in 1934.
When President
Bill Clinton ordered troops into the country in 1994 to restore
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted as president by a group of former soldiers, Haitian critics raised that earlier intervention.
A decade later, Mr. Aristide was forced out of office, and he accused the United States of orchestrating his ouster.
But as the American troops in combat fatigues bounded out of the helicopters and moved across the palace grounds, hundreds of Haitians who had gathered at the white-and-green palace gates erupted in cheers and called out in Creole for food and water.
“We can’t do it without them,” said Ms. Pierre-Louis, the former prime minister. “This country has been mismanaged for the last 50 years, and if we can’t run the country well in normal times how can we do it now?”
So far, violence has been scattered in Port-au-Prince. But senior United Nations officials said it might boil over at any moment as the difficulties of living without water, food and shelter mounted. Mrs. Préval said that she and the president were about to enter their private residence when the earthquake struck. They stepped back from the home, she said, and it collapsed before them. For hours, rumors circulated around the capital that she had been killed.
She said that Mr. Préval quickly jumped onto the back of a motorcycle taxi to tour hospitals and damaged areas with top aides, and that he had been in nonstop emergency meetings ever since. Government ministers, she added, initially held meetings in the yard of the president’s home.
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