Jan. 16: Updates on Rescue and Recovery in Haiti

On Saturday The Lede is continuing to supplement reporting by our colleagues in Haiti — including Marc Lacey, Damien Cave and Simon Romero — on the aftermath of Tuesday’s earthquake by pointing to news and information on the Web. Readers are encouraged to share any first-hand accounts they receive from Haiti or see online by writing to us in the comments thread below.

Update | 9:43 p.m. The Guardian has published a collection of this week’s Twitter messages from Richard Morse, a Haitian-American hotelier, writer and musician who has used his feed to report on the aftermath of the earthquake.

The son of an American academic and a Haitian singer, Mr. Morse — who has written for The Huffington Post in the past — has been mostly silent since this morning, although yesterday he noted that the resumption of at least partial mobile phone service might not make life that much easier for many Haitians, writing:

phones are spotty… my VOILA is working on and off. sometimes you can receive, sometimes call.sometimes just text

communication is very difficult. if you have a phone, how do you charge it? No electricity for most.

Now that the international media is in finally in place, in a country that had a single American correspondent last week, Mr. Morse also used his Twitter feed to ask an important question:

Is this a one week story? Is this a 10 day story? is this a one month story?

The Lede is signing off for the night, but we will return on Sunday to keep providing updates on the relief effort in Haiti. In the meantime go to the home page of NYTimes.com for links to articles and multimedia features filed by my colleagues in Haiti. Thanks for all your comments and tips.

Update | 8:17 p.m. In a video statement uploaded to YouTube on Saturday, Wyclef Jean, the Haitian-American musician whose Yéle Haiti foundation has raised more than $2 million in donations for disaster relief in Haiti, responded to criticism of his group’s ability to deliver aid to the country.

On Friday, The Associated Press reported:

Groups that vet charities are raising doubts about the organization backed by Haitian-born rapper Wyclef Jean, questioning its accounting practices and ability to function in earthquake-hit Haiti. Even as hundreds of thousands of dollars poured into The Wyclef Jean Foundation Inc. via text message, experts questioned how much of the money would help those in need.

”It’s questionable. There’s no way to get around that,” said Art Taylor, president and chief executive of the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance, based in Arlington, Va. […]

The foundation, founded in January 2005, intends to airlift supplies using a FedEx plane into Haiti early next week carrying medical supplies, water and Clif Bars, according to foundation president Hugh Locke.

An Associated Press review of tax returns and independent audits provided by Jean’s foundation showed that it was closely intertwined with Jean’s businesses.

On Thursday, a post on The Smoking Gun, which included a copy of the foundation’s 2006 tax return, claimed:

Internal Revenue Service records show the group has a lackluster history of accounting for its finances, and that the organization has paid the performer and his business partner at least $410,000 for rent, production services, and Jean’s appearance at a benefit concert.

Here is Mr. Jean’s response:

In a text version of the statement published on his blog, Mr. Jean chastised the media for picking up on the accusations made by The Smoking Gun:

I have spent tireless hours working on behalf of my homeland on development issues as well as human and immigrant rights. I have been committed to helping the people of Haiti throughout my life, and that commitment will continue until the day I die.

It is impossible for me to even comprehend the recent attacks on my character and the integrity of my foundation, Yele Haiti. The fact that these attacks come as we are mobilized to meet the greatest human tragedy in the history of Haiti only serves to perplex me even further. I first learned of these baseless attacks when I left Haiti late Friday, where I had been since 12 hours after the earthquake.

Let me be clear: I denounce any allegation that I have ever profited personally through my work with Yele Haiti. These baseless attacks are simply not true. In fact, I have, time and again, committed significant amounts of my own money to support the work of Yele Haiti and other organizations in support of our efforts over the years. More than that, I have spent countless hours, days, months and years of my life committed to the country of Haiti, the people of Haiti and the success of Haiti.

These baseless allegations were first put forward by a fringe website with a history of pursuing sensationalist story lines. The mainstream media’s pursuit of them has required Yele to divert precious resources during this critical time in order to answer various inquiries. That must end.

I will continue to commit my focus to what is most important right now: Haiti. Right now, Yele is working with its valuable NGO partners, the U.S. Government, the United Nations and so many others to save lives, honor those who have perished and get aid to the millions of Haitians suffering through the worst human catastrophe of our times.

Here is a statement from Albert Angel, the C.E.O. of GiveOnTheGo.com, the company working with Mr. Jean’s foundation to collect donations via text message:

Following a rigorous application and competitive selection process, Give on the Go and its parent company, Red Fish Media, was authorized by the Mobile Giving Foundation to offer donation collection services to qualifying charities. It offers those services in compliance with MGF and mobile carrier guidelines. Red Fish serves many notable Fortune 500 companies.

Give on the Go LLC is the mobile donations company that Yele Haiti has selected to provide and manage is text donation services. Yele Haiti has committed to directing all of the proceeds of the Earthquake Relief Fund for the benefit of earthquake victims. It has also agreed to publicly account for the use of these funds. Under the MGF framework monies collected by telecommunications carriers from text donations pass without carrier fees to the MGF and from the MGF to the charity. Give on the Go has offered to waive the customary service fees in it contract and remit any fees above direct costs it incurs to the benefit of Yele’s earthquake relief fund.

Red Fish Media also uploaded this video of Mr. Jean speaking about the situation in Haiti immediately after his return:

In the video, Mr. Jean discussed the grim work of helping to collect dead bodies from the streets and says that a young man named Fan Fan, who worked his foundation in Haiti, was shot and killed there this week for refusing to turn over the keys to a pick-up truck he was using to bring bodies to a cemetery in Port-au-Prince.

Mr. Jean also said that some people in Haiti are feeling the kind of frustration that led to anger in the wake of the slow relief effort in the United States after hurricane Katrina, and warned that this could lead to violence.

As my colleague Dave Itzkoff reported on our Arts Beat blog, next Friday Mr. Jean, with George Clooney and Anderson Cooper, will host a two-hour telethon next Friday night to benefit the victims of the Haitian earthquake. The commercial-free telethon, called “Hope for Haiti,” will be shown starting at 8 p.m., Eastern time, on ABC, BET, CBS, CMT, CNN, CW, FOX, HBO, MTV, NBC and VH1, in addition to the MTV Networks International, CNN International and National Geographic channels, which will show it around the world.

Update | 8:06 p.m. Here is video, from CBS News Online, of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking to reporters after her meeting with Haitian President René Préval in Port-au-Prince on Saturday:

Update | 7:16 p.m. A reader notes that the American company that owns Voilà, one of Haiti’s mobile phone providers, said in an update published earlier on Thursday that it had restored service and more than “70% of the cell sites were fully operational, with the remainder requiring repair which will be performed by maintenance teams which are on the ground in Haiti.” The company added that since “we expect extraordinarily high volumes of traffic across the local and international network, which may therefore result in some congestion of Voilà’s service,” it was suggesting that customers send text messages if they are unable to place calls.

Update | 6:51 p.m. As several people have noted, on Thursday The Minneapolis Star-Tribune published a letter to the editor from a woman channeling Satan responding to Pat Robertson, who made a bizarre statement this week that Haiti’s misfortunes had been caused by the country’s founding fathers making a pact with the devil.

As my colleague Noam Cohen points out, Mr. Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network has been propagating the idea that Haiti is cursed for years. According to a blogger named Carl Hilton, a 2004 report on CBN’s Web site began with this statement:

Two hundred years ago, a witchdoctor dedicated the island nation of Haiti to the devil. Since that time, many Haitians believe they’ve been living under a Satanic curse.

The article discussed the persistence of voodoo rituals in Haiti and said that a Christian preacher there, asked by CBN, “Do you feel Haiti is cursed?” had replied, “Yes, because our forefathers, when they were celebrating their first independence, they dedicated Haiti to a voodoo spirit.”

It is interesting to note that Troy and Tara Livesay, Christians living and working in Haiti — whose blog, Twitter feed and YouTube channel has been a source for the American media, including The Lede, this week — posted a comment on the blog that quoted the CBN article in 2007, disagreeing with the conclusion that Haiti was cursed. In their response the Livesays wrote:

Can a few people who choose a dark path make an entire country be doomed to suffer in the hands of the devil? The best analogy we’ve come up with is this — Say 30% of the U.S. population is Muslim (which is [easily] possible very soon). They are a wealthy, influential part of the population. They get together and declare that the U.S.A. is now dedicated to Islam. Do you believe that the U.S.A. is indeed doomed to belong to false religion because a few declare it to be so?

This is not confrontational — it is just something we struggle with. We don’t think a few thousand misguided people 200 years ago have the power to “curse” or condem[n] a country forevermore.

In a statement issued by CBN after Mr. Robertson’s remarks were widely denounced, a spokesman for the network argued that “countless scholars and religious figures over the centuries” had concluded “the country is cursed.”

This video report from The Miami Herald includes Mr. Robertson’s remarks, and a response from Hans Mardy of the Haitian-American Emergency Relief Committee, who suggested that it was the slavery imposed on the Africans taken to Haiti in chains that was devilish, not their successful bid for independence in 1804:

Update | 6:48 p.m. Writing on Twitter the Haitian DJ Carel Pedre saluted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her visit, and criticized Haiti’s president, René Préval:

Seems like Mrs Clinton Gave The Wake Up Call.

Mrs Clinton went to visit some survivors who spent 4 days under the rubbles. Her Speech was so emotional. […]

The president has criticized the Haitian State For letting people build they house anyhow. FYI: He served two terms!

Update | 6:42 p.m. This video, made available by the United Nations mission in Haiti on Saturday, shows aerial footage of the destruction to Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, which was filmed on Friday, as Haitian President René Préval surveyed the damage from the air:

After the flight, Mr. Préval told U.N. television, in Creole:

The priority is to put [the U.N. mission] and the government back into a functional state. We’ve seen that the UN headquarters collapsed. The Head of the UN Mission and his deputy and many of their staff are dead. […]

The second priority is to clear the roads so we can get help to the people. And I believe the third priority is to sanitize the area. There are thousands of cadavers that causing risks of epidemics. We have to — and we have already started to — take those bodies away.

Update | 6:19 p.m. Video shot by the United Nations mission in Haiti on Friday gives a visceral sense of the death and destruction in Port-au-Prince, the country’s shattered capital. The raw footage, which includes very disturbing images of dead bodies on the city’s streets, and strewn outside the morgue, begins with shots of the ruined cathedral in Port-au-Prince. A photograph taken inside the cathedral in 2007 was included in a blog post on a Haitian photographer in New York published on Friday by my colleague Corey Kilgannon.

Update | 6:09 p.m. This moving and disturbing video report from Sarah Smith of Britain’s Channel 4 News tells the heartbreaking story of a British search and rescue team trying, unsuccessfully, to save the life of a girl trapped inside a collapsed school in Port-au-Prince:On Friday, British search and rescue experts had succeeded in saving a two-year-old girl trapped beneath the rubble of a collapsed building using only makeshift tools: Update | 5:57 p.m. This report from Port-au-Prince by Jonathan Rugman of Britain’s Channel 4 News, filed earlier on Saturday, shows some of the many badly wounded survivors of Tuesday’s earthquake who are still waiting for medical treatment:Mr. Rugman’s report shows some distribution of food by the U.N. but he also says that that the international organization has only fed 8,000 of the estimated 2 million people in need.

Update | 5:29 p.m. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Haitian President René Préval are speaking to reporters in Port-au-Prince right now.

Mrs. Clinton just halted the news conference briefly to make sure that the Haitian press could make it through the pack of foreign reporters around them.

A few minutes later she said:

I want to speak directly to the Haitian people, through the Haitian media. As President Obama has said, we will be here today, tomorrow and for the time ahead. Speaking personally, I know of the great resilience and strength of the Haitian people. You have been severely tested but I believe that Haiti can come back even stronger and better in the future.

Update | 5:09 p.m. The Associated Press reports that the U.N. said on Saturday “the body of Haiti mission chief Hédi Annabi has been found in the rubble of collapsed headquarters.”

Mr. Annabi had been missing since the collapse of the Hotel Christopher, the headquarters of United Nations mission in Haiti on Tuesday. His biography on the Web site of the U.N. mission in Haiti notes he joined the international organization in 1981.

In an update on Thursday, we pointed to a tribute to Mr. Annabi on the blog of Jon Snow, the anchor of Channel 4 News in London. Mr. Snow wrote that Mr. Annabi, a Tunisian diplomat, “was one of those exceptional UN people like Sergio de Mello, the U.N. assistant secretary general blown up in Baghdad in 2003. Both men, in a sense, died in action. Both men are what makes the UN, for all its fault, a singularly remarkable and exceptional body.” Mr. Snow added, “Poignantly, Annabi delivered a new year message to the people of Haiti just five days before he died.”

The entire text of Mr. Annabi’s address to the Haitian people on January 7, in French, is available on the Web site of Radio Kiskeya.

Update | 4:15 p.m. In Saturday’s New York Times, my colleague Kareem Fahim reported on how Haitians in New York are dealing with the catastrophe back home. His article was accompanied by a very informative graphic on the Haitian community in the city.

Update | 3:35 p.m. An update posted on Saturday on the Web site of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières says that the medical charity is dealing with very grave injuries and is frustrated by delays at the airport in Port-au-Prince. According to the update:

Surgical units set up by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Port au Prince, continue to work around the clock to treat the vast numbers of patients with injuries from Tuesday’s earthquake. Prioritizing the most serious cases, the teams have been performing caesarian sections and amputations. Experienced MSF medical staff say they have never seen so many serious injuries.

In Chocsal hospital, where MSF relocated after its original facilities were so badly damaged, the operating theater has been working non-stop since early Friday. In Trinite, where the team is treating people under canvas on the grounds of the medical facility that was hit by the earthquake, surgery has been taking place in an improvised operating theater. In Carrefour, a district that was very badly affected, MSF has just started working in a hospital with two operating theatres.

One of MSF’s Operational Coordinators in Port au Prince, Hans van Dillen, says there was an immediate reaction when people found out that we were starting medical activities in Carrefour. People began crowding around the entrance. Patients are being brought in on wheelbarrows and carried on people’s backs. There are other hospitals in the area but they are already overflowing with injured people and have limited numbers of Haitian staff or supplies.

The struggle to find more buildings that could be used for MSF’s medical work is continuing, as are the efforts to get more medical staff and supplies into the country. The major difficulty here is the bottleneck at the airport, which has turned away a number of vital cargo flights. Lack of authorization to land at the airport has already caused a 24 hour-delay of the planned arrival of MSF’s much needed inflatable hospital.

On Friday night my colleague Micheline Maynard wrote that Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the F.A.A. explained how traffic at the airport was being managed:

The operations at the Port-Au-Prince airport are being coordinated by the F.A.A., the Air Force and Haitian air traffic control.

F.A.A. is managing air traffic management into Haitian airspace, and the United States Air Force is running operations on the ground. Haitian air traffic controllers are talking to planes while they are in the air en route and up until they land.

The F.A.A. issued a notice to airmen on Friday that it will be managing all international traffic headed to Haiti. It will prioritize air traffic and award slots, which allow a flight to land at the airport. The F.A.A. will coordinate the flights to a separate location at Tyndall Air Force base in Florida. It’s called the Haiti Flights Operations Coordination Center (HFOCC).

They will establish slot times at Port-Au-Prince so they know what kind of aircraft to expect at any given time. Neighboring countries asked the F.A.A. to do this, because foreign air craft are coming through their airspace as well. There’s no radar coverage in parts of the area because it’s ocean, and it is also a mountainous environment. Those foreign governments will be issuing notices that are similar to the U.S., funneling flights through the central coordination point (HFOCC).

The initial period is 72 hours but it could be extended.

When applying for slots with HFOCC, pilots are asked what they are carrying and when they want to travel. Then, a group including representatives of the Haitian government, the F.A.A. and the U.S. military, decides who can get a slot. The slots are solid for 20 minutes before the scheduled landing time and 20 minutes after. If a plane can’t make its slot, it can apply for another one.

Update | 3:00 p.m. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s plane has arrived at the airport in Port-au-Prince Haiti. We will have more on Mrs. Clinton’s visit as information becomes available. Video of her remarks on Friday, when she announced and explained the purpose of her visit, is available on the State Department’s DipNote blog.

Update | 2:56 p.m. On Saturday, The Miami Herald reports from the coastal town of Jacmel, in southern Haiti, that the death and destruction there has been largely ignored:

While the world’s attention focused on earthquake-ravaged Port-au-Prince, a catastrophe of parallel magnitude has been unfolding in isolation on the country’s southern coast, which the quake left littered with smashed buildings and extensive casualties.

Stranded and increasingly desperate residents of Jacmel, a quaint, historic Caribbean port city that suffered widespread damage and has been cut off from Port-au-Prince to the north, complain they have been forgotten. Four days after the quake struck Jacmel with equal force, they say they are still awaiting food, water, medical supplies and relief workers.

The Lede pointed to some photographs on Facebook of the destruction in Jacmel, but since Tuesday, Haitian film students at the Ciné Institute in Jacmel, have been documenting the tragedy in video reports posted online. Embedded below are three of the students’ reports uploaded to Vimeo on Thursday and Friday.

According to a report by Dana Chivvis of Sphere.com, this video by Keziah Jean was first posted on the Web at 11:30 p.m. on Thursday:

On Sphere, Ms. Chivvis explained:

Jean is one of 60 students at Haiti’s only film school, the Ciné Institute in Jacmel. The 7.0 earthquake destroyed the school but miraculously left all but one of the students alive and accounted for. The next day, they returned to the rubble that had been their classroom and found much of their equipment destroyed. But they unearthed six small video cameras and one still camera, enabling them to get to work.

This report by Fritzner Simeus was posted online on Friday:

This film, called “Prayer,” by Manassena Cesar, was posted online on Saturday:

Ms. Chivvis reported that when the earthquake struck, Manassena César “was on the roof of a house shooting a two-minute video when the building began vibrating. He threw himself down as two and three story buildings began crumbling around him. Ten seconds later, he was surrounded by broken buildings.”

Andrew Bigosinski, who teaches editing at the school, wrote on the school’s Web site on Saturday”

We are so sorry to announce that one of our students, Rose Laure Charles, has been missing and we have had no contact. Latest news is that she told us at 11am Tuesday, she was on her way to see a doctor in [Port-au-Prince].

We haven’t heard from her since. She was a motivated, dedicated and intelligent student that brought so much to our school. We continue to search by all means possible to us. We have not given up hope.

Mr. Bigosinski also shot the photographs in this Flickr slide show on the destruction in Jacmel:

Created with flickr slideshow.

The school’s Web site is soliciting donations for the relief effort in Jacmel. Annie Nocenti, a New York filmmaker who teaches at the school told Andrew O’Heir of Salon on Friday that “all donations made through Ciné Institute’s home page will go 100 percent to support earthquake relief in Jacmel and the urgent documentary work of the student filmmakers.”

Update | 2:26 p.m. From the White House YouTube channel, here is a new public service announcement featuring former President Bill Clinton and former President George W. Bush asking Americans to give money to help the Haitian relief effort:

The White House has also made video of the two former presidents appearing with President Obama at the White House on Saturday morning available, so we have added that to our 11:53 a.m. update on the new Clinton Bush Haiti Fund.

Update | 2:00 p.m. According to a report published on Saturday morning under the headline “Haitians Are Grateful and Friendly,” on the Web site of the Icelandic Association of Search and Rescue:

The Icelandic search and rescue team is at this moment preparing for morning assignments in Haiti, where the time it is now almost 7 a.m. The team is in good condition and ready to take on the tasks of the day. The exact nature of those tasks is still to be determined.

News reports from Haiti have included footage of screaming locals waving machetes, and many people are therefore worried about the safety of the search and rescue workers. Even though the situation in Haiti is quite critical, the Icelandic team has been received with nothing but gratitude and friendliness on the part of the local population and has not seen anything resembling that which is shown in foreign media.

Yesterday an assessment was done of a large number of rubble sites, but no sign of life was detected. The Haitians have been very understanding when the SAR team has had to leave the scene without finding anybody alive, and the Icelandic team has met with no harassment or interference.

The Icelanders are still in charge of the international SAR camp, and are also involved in the co-ordination center for the activities of the international SAR teams, which is located in the Icelandic camp.

On Friday the same Web site reported:

People are still known to be alive under the rubble in the hills south of the airport, where about 90% of all buildings were destroyed. UN reconnaissance teams have been to the towns of Carrefour and Léogane, located to the west of Port au Prince, and according to their assessment about 80%-90% of all buildings have collapsed there.

At present there are 23 SAR teams in Port au Prince, totalling 1067 SAR workers and 114 search dogs. and Rescue.

The Icelandic team, known as ICE-SAR, has also uploaded dozens of photographs from Port-au-Prince, including some that give a sense of the difficult and dangerous work they are engaged in.

Update | 12:54 p.m. Frederic Dupoux, using Twitter, passes on information and photographs on the ongoing rescue effort in Port-au-Prince — “Rescue team still working at Caribbean market” — and notes that a local business is open: “Universal supermarket is open on Tabarre.”

Here is the photograph he uploaded on Saturday of rescue workers at the Caribbean Market:

On Friday, The Icelandic Review reported that rescuers from Iceland had helped to pull three people to safety from the Caribbean Market on Thursday. According to The Review, “The Icelandic team was one of the first to reach the city.”

We posted video of one of those people being saved by the team from Iceland on The Lede on Friday.

Update | 12:19 p.m. On Friday, an Australian television news crew helped to rescue a 16-month-old girl from the ruins of a destroyed house in Haiti. Here is their video report:

Britain’s Channel 4 News explains:

Local residents were trying to dig out the child who was crying under the rubble. She had been buried there for almost three days without any food or water. It was Deiby Celestino, [of the television crew’s security detail], who pulled her out of the rubble. He then passed the child to Australian journalist Mike Amor. […]

Winnie’s uncle, Frantz Tilin, arrived to find her after losing his own pregnant wife in the earthquake. Workers with Save the Children fed Winnie and gave her fresh water to drink. The charity’s doctors said she was dehydrated, but expected her to make a full recovery.

After the rescue Mr. Celestino said in an interview posted online by The Associated Press that the body of the baby’s mother or father was next to the young girl under the rubble.

Update | 12:13 p.m. The Lede is mainly looking outside The Times to highlight news and information on other Web sites, but don’t miss some of the extraordinary work being done by our Times colleagues. Links to their most recent articles and multimedia features can be found on the home page of NYTimes.com. Here is a remarkable slide show of new photographs from Haiti, featuring the work of Times photographers Damon Winter and Ruth Fremson:

Update | 12:05 p.m. We have heard a lot about the building frustration with the pace of the rescue and recovery effort from Haiti’s government. Five minutes ago the Haitian DJ Carel Pedre sent this message to the country’s president, Rene Preval, on Twitter:

Mr Preval, we need 2 hear from u! Take ur responsability. Do ur job like those ppl in the streets helping each other! It’s been 4 days now

Late last night, Mr. Pedre wrote on Twitter that “For Me Leaving The Country Is Not An Option even if My Family and I are running out of water and food!” This morning though, he wrote that he was concerned for his daughter, Khara, writing:

Haiti Year 0…Day 4 – I have no more water, no more Doritos. I have to take a big decision today about Khara.

Update | 11:53 a.m. On Saturday morning at the White House, President Barack Obama was joined by his two predecessors, former President George W. Bush and former President Bill Clinton, to discuss the newly established Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, which will raise funds for Haitian relief.

Here is video of the three presidents discussing the effort on Saturday morning:

The new fund’s Web site published this statement by the two former presidents:

We are deeply saddened by the devastation and suffering caused by the recent earthquake in Haiti. The people of Haiti are in our thoughts and prayers.

We are pleased to accept President Obama’s request to lead private sector fundraising efforts. In the days and weeks ahead, we will draw attention to the many ways American citizens and businesses can help meet the urgent needs of the Haitian people.

Americans have a long history of showing compassion and generosity in the wake of tragedy. We thank the American people for rallying to help our neighbors in the Caribbean in their hour of suffering – and throughout the journey of rebuilding their nation.

For information on how you can contribute, please visit www.georgewbushcenter.com/haiti and www.clintonfoundation.org/haitiearthquake.