The first Briton known to have died in the Haiti earthquake has been named, as violence increases on the streets of Port-au-Prince amid scenes of looting and desperation.
Frederick Wooldridge was a Senior Political Affairs and Planning Officer with the United Nations in the impoverished Caribbean nation, where 100,000 people are thought to have died in Tuesday’s massive quake and hundreds of thousands more are living on the streets without food or water.
Mr Wooldridge’s family paid tribute to him saying he “loved” his work.
“Frederick was a much-loved member of a close family,” they said. “He leaves behind his wife, his parents, brother and sister, grandmother and extended family. He had many friends in the UN and beyond, particularly Geneva where he loved skiing and mountaineering.”
Around 40 UN staff are feared to have died in the collapsed UN headquarters in Port-au-Prince including Hedi Annabi, the head of the mission, his deputy, and his chief of police. Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, has arrived in Haiti for a 24-hour visit in which he will tour the ruins of the UN mission and meet President Rene Preval.
Advertisement
“I’m going there with a very heavy heart. This is one of the worst humanitarian crises in decades. The damage, destruction, loss of life is just overwhelming,” Mr Ban said as he boarded his flight for Haiti.
The United Nations was feeding 40,000 people a day and hoped to increase that to a million within two weeks, he said.
“The challenge at this time is how to coordinate all of this outpouring of assistance.”
As people turned more desperate and in the widespread absence of authority, looters swarmed over collapsed stores, carrying out food and anything else they could find. Fighting broke out between groups carrying knives, ice-picks, hammers and rocks
Residents awoke to find the bodies of thieves lynched by mobs or shot by men claiming to be plain-clothes police. A Reuters journalist said he saw the burned body of a man locals said was set ablaze by angry residents who caught him stealing, and two young men lying on the ground with bullet wounds to the head and arms tied behind their backs.
Advertisement
“Haitians are partly taking things into their own hands. There are no jails, the criminals are running free, there are no authorities controlling this,” said teacher Eddy Toussaint, part of a crowd staring at the bodies.
Many Haitians streamed out of the city on foot with suitcases on their heads or jammed in cars to find food and shelter in the countryside.
Others crowded the airport hoping to get on planes that arrived laden with emergency supplies and left packed with Haitians. The shell-shocked government has given the US military control over the tiny airport to guide aid flights from around the world.
Dozens of nations have sent planes with rescue teams, doctors, field hospitals, food, medicine and other supplies, but faced a bottleneck at the airport, where fuel was in short supply. Some groups complained that their flights had been diverted to the neighboring Dominican Republic, forcing them to carry emergency supplies into Haiti overland.
On the streets of Port-au-Prince, scarce police patrols fired occasional shots and tear gas to disperse looters and the distribution of aid appeared random, chaotic and minimal.
Advertisement
Hundreds of trucks carrying aid and guarded by armed UN patrols streamed away from the airport and U.N. headquarters to different parts of the city. But they were soon obstructed on streets clogged with people, vans carrying coffins and bodies and even makeshift roadblocks put up by homeless survivors forced to live and sleep out in the open.
There were jostling scrums for food and water as US military helicopters swooped down to throw out boxes of water bottles and rations. A reporter also saw foreign aid workers tossing packets of food to desperate Haitians.
“The distribution is totally disorganized. They are not identifying the people who need the water. The sick and the old have no chance,” said Estime Pierre Deny, standing at the back of a crowd looking for water with his empty plastic container.
Haiti is the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country and has for decades struggled with devastating storms, floods and political unrest. Around 9,000 U.N. peacekeepers have provided security since a 2004 uprising ousted one president, but the mission lost at least 40 members when its headquarters collapsed, including its top leaders.
Mr Wooldridge , 41, from Kent, studied at the London School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) before working for the UN in Geneva, Liberia and then moving to Haiti in 2007.
Advertisement
A Downing Street spokesman said the Prime Minister’s thoughts were with Mr Wooldridge’s family and friends.
He said: “The Prime Minister is hugely grateful for the work that Frederick and others were doing in the UN Stabilisation Mission: helping to build a stronger Haiti, and giving people hope where they had none. The Prime Minister’s thoughts are also with the families and friends of those British Nationals whose whereabouts have yet to be confirmed.”
There is still no news of another British UN worker missing in Haiti. Relatives of Ann Barnes, 59, said they fear the worst as she has been unaccounted for since the earthquake hit Haiti on Tuesday.