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Sky News continues to report today from Haiti where the earthquake that devastated the island state has left thousands in need of medical attention with hospitals stretched to near breaking point.

Sky News’ Chief News Correspondent spoke to a doctor at one facility in capital Port-au-Prince where Doctor Mark Lewis, next to one badly wounded man, told him: 

"He's been here for three days without getting help.

"If he does not see any one soon, he's not going to make it - which is the case for a lot of people. We have very, very, very few doctors."

For a full transcription of further quotes from today’s coverage covering the scale of the disaster, the rescue operation, and the appeals, plus selected quotes from  overnight, please see below.

Sky News and www.skynews.com will continue to bring viewers and users the  latest updates from our Sky correspondents on the ground in Haiti – Sky News Chief Correspondent Stuart Ramsay and Sky Correspondent Robert Nisbet.


__________

 

Transcripton of quotes from today on the devastation in Haiti on Sky News follows.

Any use of these quotes must be credited to Sky News:

Speaking on Sky News today, Peter Grant, the Director of Tear Fund thanked people for their generous donations to the appeal and that aid was beginning to get through:

 “I’d like to thank everyone for their generosity, in the first 36 hours after the earthquake, the Disasters Emergency Committee received over £2million in donations and that was before the television appeals aired yesterday so the figure now is much higher. 

“I must say that aid is getting through.  It is very much a two-phased approach. Many of the agencies had staff, had resources already on the ground that they have been able to utilise.  Red Cross, one of our members, had food and supplies for 3000 people; there was a 300 bed hospital coming in yesterday but we just need to scale up substantially and the challenges are very great.

“We are talking about very precarious communities with low standards of housing, they’ve been hit by hurricanes in 2008 and quite frequently, and now to have this happen to it is overwhelming really and I think the bottom line is that we can use all the resources that people are able to give to us and use those effectively and try and meet needs not just immediately, and those are great, but this is a crisis that’s going to need a response over months and indeed even years in terms of construction.

“Aid workers who are trying to deliver support, obviously we have to be concerned about their personal safety and security.  I think all the different agencies in the Disasters Emergency Committee are committed to getting this aid through but we do need the government, the United Nations and others to be able to provide that basic security.”

Lucy Easthope, a disaster specialist from the University of Bath talked about coping with the disaster:

“This is exactly the sort of thing the United Nations is trying to address when they look at things like disaster reduction vulnerability in these sort of countries, it does hit them incredibly hard.  There is no country in the world that can look to anywhere else initially, they have to be able to be resilient themselves and then, as we see, 72 hours later, a week later, aid can get in and things can start to help them but we need to support these poorer countries to become resilient in the initial days.  That’s all that can really be done.

“Haiti was already poor and unstable, a lot of the countries where we have seen major natural disasters in recent years, they have had some kind of emergency planning and resilience framework that other countries could tap into in terms of delivering that aid, even if the political ideologies were different as we’ve seen in places like Iran and China, we still know who to go to to offer the support and it is just very, very different here.  I think the other point to make is that if you look at comparatively the amount of destruction, and obviously death tolls are very, very hard to pin down, but the scale of the devastation in one country alone, one country that was already living on the edge, this is just without a comparison.”

Darren Hanniffey is the Haiti Director of the charity GOAL and spoke of the magnitude of the disaster: 

“Goal is focusing our attention on setting up housing and to supply [inaudible] so that we can take the aid when it comes in to the airport … in an organised way.  Over the last two days we’ve taken an order of supplies which are coming in from the neighbouring countries and all of that material is now en route. 

“We knew it was big when we heard the magnitude of the earthquake so close to an urban centre but on arriving on the ground it became apparent very quickly that this catastrophe was enormous.  The extent of the damage, the number of the bodies on the streets from day one was evident that this was going to be very big and so the enormous death toll is not a great surprise here on the ground.  We are seeing hospitals totally destroyed, multi story shopping centres totally levelled, multi story buildings totally levelled so it is easy to see  how we may never know the total death toll and it is so difficult to even go back in to some of these buildings because they have been so structurally damaged, it is really very dangerous going in to any of these buildings to assess if there are any survivors or to retrieve the dead.

“The difficulty is that the Haitian people are not terribly organised to manage the recovery themselves so there is a lot of extra work that has to go into the logistics of organising what is a massive movement of food, materials, water and the international aid community has to work very hard to organise that, to engage with the people, to carry out the assessment and to try to carry it out in an organised way.  It is a monumental task, there is materials and supplies coming in all of the time now and we’re getting to the stage where that is being distributed, field hospitals are being set up as we speak, water distributions are being carried out and a process, the momentum is building but inevitably it has been slow with the extent of the disaster, it was a complete destruction of a city.”

Mark Astorita, the Fund Raising Director for the Red Cross, talked about how the money raised would be used:

“People have been really generous, it’s really coming in strong and it’s wonderful to see.  People round this room have raised around £150,000 in the last few days, £25 will buy a family pack, £50 will feed a family for a fortnight and £100 will shelter two families so small sums of money are making a big difference here.  We have people on the ground already.  Yes, it’s not as good as any of us would like to see.  We have people in the air at the moment including the British Red Cross logistics team who are going to be setting up warehousing and setting up distribution points so things are happening. This  happens every time there is a disaster, we would all like it to be quicker but it is difficult out there.”

Clive Hodges, the Chief Executive of Rapid UK, talked about their rescue team that was operational in Haiti and the rescue they had been involved in:

“Our team has been now searching in Port-au-Prince for about 24 hours.  Yesterday they were involved in a successful search rescuing an injured policewoman from a collapsed building and they are back on task in a similar part of the city this morning. 

“We are concentrating very much on the rescue operation as opposed to the relief operation.  Like everyone else, we’re suffering from very intermittent communications with our team and when we do talk to them, we talk to them about the search and the rescue rather than the wider relief so I can’t comment on that side of it.  They were on talk within almost half an hour of them arriving in Haiti yesterday and the fact that they have already had a successful rescue has been brilliant for morale and they are back on the task now and they will keep going for as long as the belief is that there are people to rescue.”

Paul Kenneally of the International Red Cross talked about their co-ordinated and specialised teams:

“We are together with about 15 Red Cross personnel from all over the globe, from Norway, from Denmark, from Spain, from Switzerland, from Japan and so on, mainly comprised of medical, water and sanitation and shelter specialists.  We are about five hours from Port-au-Prince, there is also about six to eight trucks of specialised equipment, the most important of which we have to focus on is urgent medical attention and facilities so we have a field hospital, an equipped field hospital which includes two operating theatres which can be put up I’m told by our head surgeon, a Norwegian, Bryn, it can be put up in a matter of  hours and treat up to 200 people a day so we’re making good progress and we hope to be in Port-au-Prince in about five hours.

“We have already a local partner on the ground from the Haitian Red Cross. We also sent in an advance team so our office is already operational there before the earthquake and the special disaster response has been there since early Thursday morning, so everything is prepared and ready, we’re just part of a bigger build up which is coming.  We have already on the ground the French Red Cross, the American Red Cross, the Canadian Red Cross, all being co-ordinated by the International Federation of the Red Cross.

“Water is a major concern and I spoke to our head surgeon there this morning and he said we can treat 200 people a day as long as we can manage to get the clean water supply in but have also the Spanish Red Cross who are specialists in water purification and supply management and this will be a major priority for them to get involved so we are confident that we can get on top of this as quickly as possible.

“This is a lesson learned from many major disasters in the past, especially the tsunami co-ordination and partnership and synchronising our resources is absolutely key.  In the International Red Cross/Red Crescent movement we are used to this because we are a global federation so we work together according to our different specialities and strengths and we will of course be tying in with local and national organisations, particularly the Haitian Red Cross, in order to complement each other and reinforce each other’s strengths and not to duplicate and to keep focus on the humanitarian urgency and the humanitarian mission and the needs of the people on the ground.  This has to be at the forefront of everybody’s minds.”

Quotes from www.skynews.com  report at 9.40am this morning:

Despite the devastation, there are some glimpses of hope, after British fire-fighters managed to pull a two-year-girl from a collapsed building.

The young girl, called Mia, was trapped under piles of rubble in Port-au-Prince and was rescued on the first full day of deployment for the 64-strong team following the devastating earthquake.

Mike Thomas, chief officer of the fire and rescue team, said: "This is a real boost to us all. This is what we do the job for. The conditions we are working in our pretty dire. The local people have no food and water and are suffering in more ways than one."

International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander added: "This is fantastic news. I know that everyone in Britain will share my pride at the vital and dangerous work being carried out by these brave fire-fighters in Haiti's hour of need. They are truly inspirational."

For more information, please contact:

Stella Tooth

Sky News Publicity

07802 754877

Or

Francoise Frost

Sky News Publicity

07824 834825

 

NOTE TO EDITORS

Grabs from today’s Sky News Haiti earthquake coverage are being sent by Sky Stills 020 7800 4202 to picture desks.

 

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