PORT-AU-PRINCE: Turning pickup trucks into ambulances and doors into stretchers, Haitians were frantically struggling to save those injured in this week’s earthquake as desperately needed aid from around the world began arriving today.

An Air China plane carrying a Chinese search-and-rescue team, medics and tons of food and medicine landed at Port-au-Prince airport before dawn, joining three French planes with aid and a mobile hospital, officials said. A British relief team arrived in neighbouring Dominican Republic.

The US and other nations said they were sending food, water, medical supplies to assist the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation, where the international Red Cross estimated 3 million people - a third of the population - may need emergency relief. In the streets of the capital, survivors set up camps amid piles of salvaged goods, including food being scavenged from the rubble.

“This is much worse than a hurricane,” said Jimitre Coquillon, a doctor’s assistant working at a makeshift triage centre set up in a hotel parking lot. “There’s no water. There’s nothing. Thirsty people are going to die.” If there were any organised efforts to distribute food or water, they were not visible yesterday.

The aid group Doctors Without Borders treated wounded at two hospitals that withstood the quake and set up tent clinics elsewhere to replace its damaged facilities. Cuba, which already had hundreds of doctors in Haiti, treated injured in field hospitals.

President Barack Obama promised an all-out rescue and humanitarian effort including the military and civilian emergency teams from across the US. The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson was expected to arrive off the coast today and the Navy said the amphibious assault ship USS Bataan had been ordered to sail as soon as possible with a 2,000-member Marine unit. “We have to be there for them in their hour of need,” Obama said.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said the French three planes are to evacuate around 60 injured people to hospitals in the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. He told France Inter radio that two more relief planes are on their way.

There was no estimate on how many people were killed by Tuesday’s magnitude-7 quake. Haitian President Rene Preval said the toll could be in the thousands. Leading Sen. Youri Latortue told The Associated Press the number could be 500,000, but conceded that nobody really knew. “Let’s say that it’s too early to give a number,” Preval told CNN.

Survivors used sledgehammers and their bare hands to try to find victims in the rubble. In Petionville, next to the capital, people dug through a collapsed shopping centre, tossing aside mattresses and office supplies.

Asia offers help

Associated Press

Beijing, January 14

Asian leaders cited their own experiences with natural disasters today in offering help to quake-shattered Haiti as part of a massive international effort to alleviate the effects of the catastrophe.

Haiti’s devastation is all too familiar to Indonesia: a mammoth quake struck off the country’s western coast in 2004, spawning a tsunami that killed about 230,000 people in 14 countries - half of them in Indonesia.

“As a country that has been itself devastated by a similar situation, we are absolutely saddened by what’s happening in Haiti,” Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa said at a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Vietnam. “We call on the ASEAN community, including ourselves, of course, to do what we can do to assist them.”

The United Nations has released $10 million from its emergency funds.

The World Bank said it would provide $100 million in emergency aid to Haiti. Australia pledged an initial $9.3 million for emergency humanitarian relief and reconstruction assistance. Japan will provide up to $5 million in aid, along with $330,000 worth of tents and blankets.