Haiti Earthquake Relief is Stifled by Chaos in Port-au-Prince

Haiti Earthquake Relief is Stifled by Chaos in Port-au-Prince - Mary Beth Sheridan and William Booth, Washington Post.

Security has emerged as one of the most formidable challenges in this earthquake-shattered capital, officials said Monday, limiting the ability of the United Nations and relief officials from elsewhere to distribute the food and medicine beginning to pile up at the airport. The U.N. Security Council on Monday unanimously endorsed a proposal from Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to send 3,500 more peacekeepers to Haiti to assist in the humanitarian relief effort, but it was not clear how soon they would arrive. Pentagon officials, meanwhile, said they had about 1,700 troops in Haiti, the vanguard of an estimated 5,000 American soldiers and Marines expected to be in the country by midweek. "Security is the key now in order for us to be able to put our feet on the ground," said Vincenzo Pugliese, a U.N. spokesman. He said a lack of security had limited peacekeepers' access "to the operational theater" - the city beyond the U.N. compound's walls. The acknowledgement came as the streets here filled with people scrambling to survive six days after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake destroyed the Haitian capital. The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, estimated that 200,000 people were killed in the earthquake, far more than the 50,000 estimated over the weekend. The new figure is based on information from the Haitian government, but officials cautioned that it was still only an estimate.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/18/AR2010011802010.html?hpid=topnews