84-Year-Old Woman Pulled from Rubble

Updated at 5:22 p.m. EST

A 84-year-old Haitian woman was pulled from the rubble 10 days after Haiti's killer earthquake, but a doctor treating her said she is in bad condition and may not survive.

Relatives of Marie Carida Romain say they freed her Friday from the ruins of her house.

Yves Romain, a 58-year-old telephone technician, said he and his family were sleeping in front of the collapsed home when they heard moaning from inside and called neighbours for help. After 20 hours of digging with bare hands, he said, they freed his mother.

The woman, looking skeletal and unconscious, was being treated at the capital's General Hospital. "She is very thin. She is in a state of shock and severely dehydrated," said Dr. Louis Auguste, who works at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, New York.

He said that while she had been buried for a long time, "there were always people who defy the norm."

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Later that day, an Israeli Search and Rescue team saved a 22-year-old Haitian man from a collapsed three-story building. The man was transferred to an Israeli Defense Field Hospital and is in stable condition.

The latest rescues come as Haiti begins to wind down its search-and-rescue operation, instead shifting focus to keeping earthquake victims alive.

"We all hope that others have survived and can be found, but the more days that go by without signs of life, the dimmer these hopes will become," U.N. mission spokesman David Wimhurst said.

Haiti's government estimates the Jan. 12 quake killed 200,000 people, as reported by the European Commission. It said 250,000 people were injured and 2 million homeless in the nation of 9 million. Others offer smaller estimates.

The disaster has prompted what the Red Cross calls the greatest deployment of emergency responders in its 91-year history. Nations around the world have offered what they can: more than $500 million from European nations, money even from impoverished Chad and Congo, and a ton of tea from Sri Lanka.

The U.N.'s World Food Program said it has distributed more than 1.4 million food rations - each with three meals, and has a fleet of trucks bringing food and supplies from the Dominican Republic.

"We are planning to flood the country with food," Myrta Kaulard, the agency's Haiti director, told the AP.

Meanwhile, Haitians are fleeing their quake-ravaged capital by the hundreds of thousands, aid officials said Friday, as their government promised to help nearly a half-million more move from squalid camps on curbsides and vacant lots into safer, cleaner tent cities.

Aid officials said some 200,000 people have crammed into buses, nearly swamped ferries and set out even on foot to escape the ruined capital. For those who stay, foreign engineers have started levelling land on the fringes of the city for tent cities, supposedly temporary, that are meant to house 400,000 people.

The goal is to halt the spread of disease at hundreds of impromptu settlements that have no water and no place for sewage. Homeless families have erected tarps and tents, cardboard and scrap as shelter from the sun, but they will be useless once the summer rainy season hits.

The new camps "are going to be going to places where they will have at least some adequate facilities," Fritz Longchamp, chief of staff to President Rene Preval, told The Associated Press on Thursday.

With extensive swaths of Port-au-Prince in ruins, more than 500 makeshift settlements with a population of about 472,000 are now scattered around the capital, said Jean-Philippe Chauzy, spokesman for the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration. Getting them to safer quarters could take weeks.

"These settlements cannot be built overnight. There are standards that have to be designed by experts. There is the levelling of the land, procurement and delivery of tents, as well as water and sanitation," said Vincent Houver, the IOM's mission chief in Haiti.

The move will be voluntary and temporary, according to Elisabeth Byrs, the spokeswoman for the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Geneva.

"It's to help them in a first move. After, the people will decide if they want to stay," she said.

To speed the flow of aid into the country, the U.S. Army, Navy and Coast Guard are trying to patch up the Haitian capital's only functional industrial pier, which is key to getting in large aid shipments as well as to Haiti's long-term recovery.

Only four ships have been able to dock at the pier, where 15-inch-wide cracks make it risky to let more than one truck work at a time, and damage is so extensive that military officials say they don't know how long it will take before ships can dock and unload in large quantities.

Damage at the country's badly damaged main oil terminal has kept any tankers from landing since the quake, so gas stations on fuel trucked in from the neighbouring Dominican Republic.

On the waterfront Thursday, sporadic rounds of gunfire echoed from the nearby downtown commercial area. Scavengers continued to rampage through collapsed and burning shops. U.S. troops patrolled nearby to protect aid convoys, but were leaving policing to Haitian and U.N. forces.

At a building in the Carrefour neighbourhood, where the multi-faith Eagle Wings Foundation of West Palm Beach, Florida, planned to distribute food, stick-wielding quake victims from a nearby tent camp stormed the stores and made off with what the charity's Rev. Robert Nelson said were 50 tons of rice, oil, dried beans and salt. Fights broke out as others stole food from the looters.

At the south of Haiti's main bay, near the earthquake's epicenter, the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard - which together have put 20 ships into the relief effort - set up a triage centre amid the rusting motorboats, with dozens of military doctors treating the most urgent casualties on the lawn.

"The injured seem to just keep showing up," said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Chris Worth. "We've been working from dawn to dusk since getting here."

Emergency medical centres almost everywhere were swamped with patients critically injured by the quake. There were dire shortages of surgeons, nurses, medicines and medical tools.

Doctors said patients were dying of sepsis from untreated wounds.

"A large number of those coming here are having to have amputations, since their wounds are so infected," said Brynjulf Ystgaard, a Norwegian surgeon at a Red Cross field hospital.