First to the story
Two Australian news channels helped rescue an 18-month-old baby found in Port-au-Prince after a barely audible sound of crying was detected inside a collapsed home.
While Nine Network’s cameraman put down his camera and climbed into the rubble to help carry the baby to safety, the rival Seven network recorded the entire episode and broadcast the extraordinary footage - claiming that their own correspondent had rescued the child.
Australian newspapers reported that the Nine cameraman has apologised to his bosses for missing the shot. Robert Penfold, the Nine presenter, told The Australian newspaper: “She looked astonished, almost as if she was seeing the world for the first time.”
The smell
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From Giles Whittell, our reporter in Port-au-Prince: “The smell of the bodies just gets worse and more intense every day. Downtown, almost everybody now goes around with either a handkerchief or a paper mask over their nose. Haitians are resorting to wearing a stripe of toothpaste on their upper lip against the smell, which is sick and sweet and ugly. The reason for it is obvious. You see these totally pancaked buildings and you know nobody in them had a hope in hell, and that there are however many bodies lying inside them.”
Homecoming
A Haitian-American paratrooper who left Haiti when he was 13 returned to help the aid effort in the quake-stricken country.
Staff sergeant Junior Florestal, 33, is one of at least three Haitian-American paratroopers in the 82nd Airborne Division who landed in Port-au-Prince on Wednesday.
He said: “I’d always wanted to come, but I didn’t want to come in this way.”
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Florestal spent Saturday searching for his family.
He found one of his cousins who told him that most of his family, including his aunt and uncle, had survived the quake.
Text message rescue
A rescue team from Florida found a group of survivors trapped inside a collapsed supermarket after one of them sent a text message to the United Nations. Maria, Ariel and Lamy were buried for more than 100 hours.
“I’m seven,” Ariel shouted to rescuers adding that she was stuck next to a dead man but covered with supermarket food.
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Joseph Fernandez, of a Florida search and rescue team, said: “It was electric when we saw the fruit of our labour, when that little girl came out.”
Another text SOS
A German woman buried under the rubble of her hotel sent her son an SMS urging him to get help.
Nadine Cardoso-Riedl, 62, spent four days in the wreckage of the Montana Hotel, which she co-owns, until she was rescued in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Mrs Cardoso-Riedl was badly dehydrated but otherwise in good condition.
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Food delivery
The World Food Programme is being criticised for the apparently haphazard way it is distributing food.
At one delivery site a riot broke out when an unannounced convoy was accosted by desperate people. Guerrier Ernso, 25, a linguistics student, approached the UN officials and asked them to call ahead in future so that preparations could be made. “They have to create another way to deliver food,” he said. “It’s not [the survivors’] fault, they are hungry.”
“Is that all there is?”
Food rations provided by the United Nations reached a camp for 10,000 displaced Haitians yesterday.
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But people at the Challe camp were disappointed with the small packets of dry biscuits, which were the only food available.
Vanel Louis-Paul, a father of three, said: “Is that all there is? We have been waiting since Tuesday and that is all that has arrived.”
UN chief in the rubble
Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, arrived in Port-au-Prince yesterday. “I am here to say we are with you. You are not alone,” he said after surveying the scale of the damage in a helicopter.
Mr Ban, who met with Haitian President Rene Preval, also toured a makeshift tent city of 50,000 people next to the collapsed presidential palace. “We are dying,” a woman told him, explaining she did not have any food to give her five children.
Miracle survivor
Soon after Mr Ban had visited the collapsed remains of the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, a Danish UN civil affairs official was pulled out from the ruins unharmed.
Jen Kristensen was found by US rescue workers from Virginia. One of the UN staff said: “They just pulled him out without a scratch.” Mr Ban called it “a small miracle”.
Found alive
A woman was pulled from the rubble of a row of shops after a 12-hour rescue by French and US medics and fire fighters.
The French and US crews heard Marie-France, 22, cry out for help yesterday afternoon and began drilling through the double reinforced steel door that had shielded her as the quake hit.
A doctor was lowered by his feet into the hole dug by the teams to assess Marie-France’s condition.
She was anaesthetised and taken to an Israeli field hospital after her rescue.
Fire Commander Daniel Vigee said: “She is someone who wants to live. She survived thanks to her mental strength.”
Record rescue
US search and rescue teams from Los Angeles, Miami and Florida, made the most rescues on any single day since the quake struck on Tuesday - 10 people with thousands still buried.
Riots and looting
Despite the brutal vigilante justice meted out in a series of lynchings, theft and rioting continue to blight parts of the devastated city. Hundreds of rioters, for example, ransacked the Hyppolite market in the heart of the Haitian capital. Police reinforcements arrived armed with shotguns and assault rifles - one rioter was shot in the head.