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Workers are carving out mass graves
on a hillside north of Haiti's capital, using earth-movers to bury
10,000 earthquake victims in a single day while relief workers warn
the death toll could increase.
      

Medical clinics have 12-day patient backlogs, untreated injuries
are festering and makeshift camps housing thousands of survivors
could foster disease, experts said.
      

"The next health risk could include outbreaks of diarrhea,
respiratory tract infections and other diseases among hundreds of
thousands of Haitians living in overcrowded camps with poor or
nonexistent sanitation," said Dr. Greg Elder, deputy operations
manager for Doctors Without Borders in Haiti.
      

Hoping to assess the scope of the crisis, World Food Program
chief Josette Sheeran planned to visit Haiti on Thursday, as did
European Union aid chief Karel De Gucht.
      

The death toll is estimated at 200,000, according to Haitian
government figures relayed by the European Commission, with 80,000
buried in mass graves. The commission now estimates 2 million
homeless, up from 1.5 million, and says 250,000 are in need of
urgent aid.
      

In the sparsely populated wasteland of Titanyen, north of
Port-au-Prince, burial workers on Wednesday said the macabre task
of handling the never-ending flow of bodies was traumatizing.
      

"I have seen so many children, so many children. I cannot sleep
at night and, if I do, it is a constant nightmare," said Foultone
Fequiert, 38, his face covered with a T-shirt against the
overwhelming stench.
      

The dead stick out at all angles from the mass graves - tall
mounds of chalky dirt, the limbs of men, women and children frozen
together in death. "I received 10,000 bodies yesterday alone,"
said Fequiert.
      

Workers say they have no time to give the dead proper religious
burials or follow pleas from the international community that
bodies be buried in shallow graves from which loved ones might
eventually retrieve them.
      

"We just dump them in, and fill it up," said Luckner Clerzier,
39, who was helping guide trucks to another grave site farther up
the road.
      


An Associated Press reporter counted 15 burial mounds at
Clerzier's site, each covering a wide trench cut into the ground
some 25 feet deep, and rising 15 feet into the air. At the larger
mass grave, where Fequiert toiled, three earth-moving machines cut
long trenches into the earth, readying them for more cadavers.
      

Others struggle to stem the flow of the dead.
      

More than eight days after the magnitude-7.0 earthquake,
rescuers searched late into the night for survivors with dogs and
sonar equipment. A Los Angeles County rescue team sent three dogs
separately into the rubble on a street corner in Petionville, a
suburb overlooking Port-au-Prince. Each dog picked up the scent of
life at one spot.
      

They tested the spot and screamed into the rubble in Creole
they've learned: "If you hear me, bang three times."
      

They heard no response, but vowed to continue.
      

"It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and each day
the needles are disappearing," team member Steven Chin said.
      

One rescue was reported. The International Medical Corps said it
was caring for a child found in ruins Wednesday. The boy's uncle
told doctors and a nurse with the Los Angeles-based organization
that relatives pulled the 5-year-old from the wreckage of his home
after searching for a week, said Margaret Aguirre, an IMC
spokeswoman in Haiti.
      

A Dutch adoption agency said Thursday that a mercy flight
carrying 106 adopted children was on its way to the Netherlands
from Port-au-Prince. The children on board the plane were all in
the process of being adopted and already had been matched to new
Dutch parents before the quake.
      

At the Mission Baptiste hospital south of Port-au-Prince,
patients waited on benches or rolling beds while doctors and nurses
raced among them, X-rays in hand.
      

The hospital had just received badly need supplies from soldiers
of the U.S Army's 82nd Airborne Division, but hospital director
John Angus said there wasn't enough. He pleaded for more doctors,
casts and metal plates to fix broken limbs.
      

Meanwhile, a flotilla of rescue vessels led by the U.S. hospital
ship Comfort steamed into Port-au-Prince harbor Wednesday to help
fill gaps in the struggling global effort to deliver water, food
and medical help.
      

Elder, of Doctors Without Borders, said that patients were dying
of sepsis from untreated wounds and that some of the group's posts
had 10- to 12-day backups of patients.
      

Adding to the terror, a 5.9-magnitude aftershock shook Haiti's
capital Wednesday, sending people screaming into the streets. Some
buildings collapsed and an undertaker said one woman died of a
heart attack. Surgical teams and patients were forced to evacuate
temporarily from at least one hospital.
      

At United Nations headquarters in New York, U.N. humanitarian
chief John Holmes said it was believed 3 million people are
affected. Vast, makeshift camps and settlements have sprung up for
survivors.
      

Joseph St. Juste and his 5-year-old daughter, Jessica, were
among 50,000 people spending their nights at a golf course. He is
afraid to stay in his home because of the aftershocks.
      

The survivors have put of shelters of bedsheets or cardboard
boxes on fairways that snake up the hill toward a country club
where U.S. paratroopers give out food daily.
      

St. Juste, a 36-year-old bus driver, wakes up every day and goes
out to find food and water for his daughter.
      

"I wake up for her," he said. "Life is hard anymore. I've got
to get out of Haiti. There is no life in Haiti."
      

Associated Press writers contributing to this report included
Alfred de Montesquiou, Tamara Lush, Kevin Maurer, Michelle Faul,
Bill Gorman and Jessica Desvarieux in Haiti; Edith M. Lederer at
the United Nations; Emma Vandore and Elaine Ganley in Paris; and
Aoife White in Brussels.
      
      

Gallery

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Minnesota-based relief agency reports from Haiti

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Disasters

Workers are carving out mass graves
on a hillside north of Haiti's capital, using earth-movers to bury
10,000 earthquake victims in a single day while relief workers warn
the death toll could increase.

Haiti's mass graves swell; doctors fear more death

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