SAN BERNARDO, Chile - The Desarmes family left their native Haiti two weeks after the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake, joining the eldest son in Chile for what seemed a refuge from the fear and chaos of Port-au-Prince.

Their sense of security lasted barely a month. It was shattered at 3:43 a.m. Saturday when one of the most powerful quakes on record shook a swath of Chile.

All the Desarmes’ immediate family survived both quakes. But twice cursed, the family now sleeps in the garden of a home that the eldest son, Pierre Desarmes, found for them just south of the Chilean capital of Santiago. They fear yet another temblor will strike.

“I left my country and came here because of an earthquake,” Seraphin Philomene, a 21-year-old student and cousin of Desarmes, said Wednesday. “And here, the same thing!”

“My God, I left my country and I didn’t die, but I’m going to die here!”

Pierre Desarmes, 34, managed to get his family out of Haiti thanks to personal contacts at the Chilean Embassy in Port-au-Prince and the Chilean armed forces. Nine members of his family — his parents, two brothers and their families, and three cousins — arrived in Santiago on a Chilean air force plane Jan. 23.

Desarmes, the lead singer of a popular Haitian reggaeton band in Chile, still gets choked up when he recalls seeing his family for the first time stepping off the plane.

“I saw them but I didn’t believe it. I said, ‘My God, they’re here.’ It was a very difficult moment,” he said, speaking in French in the garden of the house the family now calls home.

“Each time I think about it, I get sad, because I realize I was able to do this because I was here. But there are so many people who are there and I don’t know what’s going to happen to them.”

Deeply unsettled
His relatives had to leave Haiti with only hours’ notice, receiving instructions on where to go via cell phone text messages from a relative in the United States who was in contact with Desarmes in Santiago. Philomene didn’t even have time to pack, dashing to the Chilean Embassy when she received word the family had been cleared to fly out.

Saturday’s earthquake has made a difficult transition even more traumatic.

“When the aftershocks come, they refuse to stay in the house,” Desarmes said, sipping a Coke at a table in the garden, his relatives sitting nearby.

“I have to talk to them all day long telling them: ‘There are no problems, it’s a country that’s prepared for earthquakes, it’ll pass, it’s not so bad.’ But they don’t hear me. Psychologically for them, they’re still really affected by it.”

Desarmes’ brother, Stanley Desarmes, 32, is deeply unsettled. The father of a 2-year-old girl, Nelia, who plays in the yard, he worries for his family’s safety and is thinking about uprooting them again to move somewhere with less danger of earthquakes.

“I don’t know what I can do, but staying isn’t possible,” he said. “I could die and I could lose my family. I have to leave. I don’t know where, I don’t know how. But I don’t want to die with my family here.”

Philomene, his cousin, plans to stay, hoping to bring the rest of her family to Chile. She was the only member of her immediate family to get out because she was living with the Desarmes in the Haitian capital to finish her studies. Her mother, father, two sisters and a brother are still in Cap-Haitien, a town in northern Haiti about 90 miles from the capital.

“I’ve had no news from them,” she said, choking up.

‘God is looking out for us’
Reached late Wednesday by The Associated Press in Cap-Haitien, Philomene’s father, Luigene Philomene, was elated at the news that his daughter was safe. He said he hadn’t heard from her since before Chile’s earthquake and had been trying to reach relatives in Port-au-Prince for an update.

The elder Philomene said when he heard that his daughter had been in the Chile earthquake he thought of a Haitian saying that loosely translates as “we saved her from the river and she ended up in the sea.” Now he feels she has divine protection and the 43-year-old said he would eagerly join his daughter in South America if he could.

“God is looking for out for us,” he said. “Our family didn’t die in Haiti so they aren’t going to die in Chile either.”

Francius Pierre, a cousin of Seraphin’s in Port-au-Prince, had already learned from a brother that his relatives in Chile survived. Pierre, a university student who injured his knee in the Haitian quake, said Seraphin and his other relatives moved from Haiti for safety.

“If they knew something like this could happen again they never would have gone,” he said.

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (picture): BAHAMASLOCAL, DAILYMAIL

SANTIAGO, Chile - A massive magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck Chile early Saturday, killing at least 85 people, triggering a tsunami and damaging buildings more than 200 miles away.

President Michelle Bachelet declared a “state of catastrophe”.

At least 23 aftershocks were reported, including one registering at 6.9 on the Richter scale.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake struck 56 miles northeast of the city of Concepcion at a depth of 22 miles at 3:34 a.m. (1:34 a.m. ET).

Jessica Sigala, a geophysicist with the USGS told NBC News that the quake released 500 times more energy than the than the one that hit Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on January 12. The quake was felt in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which is located more than 800 miles away.

Tsunami warnings were issued over a wide area, including Hawaii, South America, Australia and New Zealand, Japan, the Philippines, Russia and many Pacific islands.

NBC station KNHL reported that the first tsunami wave was expected to reach Hawaii’s coastline at 11:19 a.m. local time (4:19 p.m. ET). It warned that “urgent action should be taken to protect lives and property.”

Giant wave
Reuters reported that a tsunami caused by the quake caused “serious damage” to Chile’s sparsely populated Juan Fernández Islands. Citing local police, CNN reported that the islands had been hit by a 40-meter (131-foot) wave.

Bachelet, the country’s president, urged people to stay calm. She told Reuters that 85 deaths had been confirmed.

Edmundo Perez Yoma, the interior minister, warned the death toll “will continue rising.”

An Associated Press Television News cameraman said some buildings collapsed in the capital Santiago, which lies about 200 miles north of the epicenter.

In the moments after the quake, people streamed onto the streets of the capital, hugging each other and crying.

Jen Ross, a journalist based in Santiago, told NBC’s TODAY that she felt “three minutes of shaking”.

Broadcaster TVN reported that several hospitals had suffered structural damage and were being evacuated.

‘It’s like the end of the world’
“Never in my life have I experienced a quake like this, it’s like the end of the world,” one man told local television from the city of Temuco, where the quake damaged buildings.

Simon Shalders, who lives in Santiago, told Sky News: “There was a lot of movement. The houses were really shaking, walls were moving backwards and forwards, and doors were swinging open.

“Santiago has got a history of earthquakes and basically there’s not a lot of old construction in Santiago because of these earthquakes.

“The new buildings in Santiago are designed to withstand fairly strong quakes and they probably held up pretty well.”

There were blackouts in parts of Santiago and communications were still down in the area closest to the epicenter.

Santiago resident Leo Perioto told CNN that “windows were wobbling a lot” in his six-story building.

“The whole building was shaking,” he added. “We could feel the walls moving from side to side.”

An earthquake of magnitude 8 or over can cause “tremendous damage,” the USGS said. The quake that devastated Port-au-Prince on January 12 was rated magnitude 7.0.

‘Threat to more distant coasts’
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said the Chile quake generated a tsunami that may have been destructive along the coast near the epicenter “and could also be a threat to more distant coasts.”

According to a 2002 census, Concepcion is one of the largest cities in Chile with a population of around 670,000.

In 1960, Chile was hit by the world’s biggest earthquake since records dating back to 1900.

The 9.5 magnitude quake devastated the south-central city of Valdivia, killing 1,655 people and sending a tsunami which battered Easter Island 2,300 miles off Chile’s Pacific seaboard and continued as far as Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines.

Alone in the darkness beneath layers of rubble, Dan Woolley felt blood streaming from his head and leg.

Then he remembered — he had an app for that.

Woolley, an aid worker, husband, and father of two boys, followed instructions on his cell phone to survive the January 12 earthquake in Haiti.

“I had an app that had pre-downloaded all this information about treating wounds. So I looked up excessive bleeding and I looked up compound fracture,” Woolley told CNN.

The application on his iPhone is filled with information about first aid and CPR from the American Heart Association. “So I knew I wasn’t making mistakes,” Woolley said. “That gave me confidence to treat my wounds properly.”

Trapped in the ruins of the Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince, he used his shirt to bandage his leg, and tied his belt around the wound. To stop the bleeding on his head, he firmly pressed a sock to it.

Concerned he might have been experiencing shock, Woolley used the app to look up what to do. It warned him not to sleep. So he set his phone alarm to go off every 20 minutes.

Once the battery got down to less than 20 percent of its power, Woolley turned it off. By then, he says, he had trained his body not to sleep for long periods, drifting off only to wake up within minutes.

Woolley’s job keeps him tech savvy. He oversees interactive projects for the Christian child advocacy organization Compassion International in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

With his injuries tended to, he wrote a note to his family in his journal: “I was in a big accident, an earthquake. Don’t be upset at God. He always provides for his children even in hard times. I’m still praying that God will get me out, but he may not. But even so he will always take care of you.”

The journal is stained with his blood.

After more than 60 hours, Woolley was pulled from the rubble.

“Those guys are rescue heroes,” he said of the crew that pulled him out.

His colleague David Hames has not been found. The two had been standing together when the earthquake struck and the Hotel Montana crumbled. They were making a film about poverty in Haiti and had just gotten back to the hotel, heading to the elevator in the lobby.

“Then all of a sudden just all craziness broke loose,” Woolley said. “Convulsions of the ground around us, the walls started rippling and then falling on us. [Hames] yelled out, ‘I think it’s an earthquake!’ I looked for someplace safe to jump to and there was no safe place.”

When the shaking stopped, Woolley couldn’t see. And his friend was not with him.

He turned on the focus light of a camera he was wearing around his neck, but he didn’t have his glasses. “So I actually took some pictures and would look at the back of the lens of the camera and saw in one of those pictures the elevator that I ended up hobbling over to. And that became my safe place.”

Once in the elevator, he used the app — called “Pocket First Aid & CPR” from Jive Media — to tend to his injuries. Woolley said his phone “was like a high-tech version of a Swiss Army knife that enabled me to treat my own injuries, track time, stay awake and stay alive.”

Woolley heard voices of some other people trapped nearby, and they spoke with each other.

“About a day, maybe day and a half in, we heard rescuers, and they had a list of our names at that point, because they were able to talk to one of the people we were talking with. And so then it seemed like, OK, this is going to happen, we’re actually going to get rescued.

“But then it just took a long time and there were times where I didn’t hear anything or I’d hear drilling in a far part of the building and just didn’t get any reassurance they were still coming for me,” Woolley said.

“The scene outside was a lot more chaotic and less simple than I imagined in my head. … But eventually they came for me and did an amazing rescue.”

Back home now in Colorado Springs with his wife Christina and children Josh, 6, and Nathan, 3, Woolley said he’s grateful to God for getting him through the ordeal.

“Happiness is a morning with … family, filled with Legos, kissing boo-boos and normalcy.”

Source (article): CNN

Source (pictures): PDACORTEX

No question, the two church-goers from New Jersey had the best intentions in the world when they arrived in Port-au-Prince this week to help victims of Haiti’s killer earthquake.

Trouble was, that was all they had in a land where food, water, shelter and transportation are at a desperate premium, said Laura Blank, a disaster communications manager on the ground for World Vision, a Christian humanitarian aid group with long ties to the country.

“They seemed very eager and very passionate about helping the people of Haiti, but they didn’t have a ride to get out of the airport,” said Blank, who had to direct the pair to assistance.

More than a week after a magnitude-7 earthquake devastated the country, disaster organizers say they’re seeing the first signs of a problem that can hinder even the most ambitious recovery efforts: good intentions gone wrong.

From volunteer medical teams who show up uninvited, to stateside donors who ship boxes of unusable household goods, misdirected compassion can actually tax scarce resources, costing time, money, energy — and lives, experts say.

“Everyone wants to be a hero. Everyone wants to help,” said Dr. Thomas Kirsch, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Refugee and Disaster Response. “It’s not the way to do it.”

Even a medical crew from his own school — Kirsch declined to identify them — arrived in Haiti so ill-prepared they had to seek sustenance from non-governmental organizations.

“They had no bedding, supplies or food,” he said. “They ended up glomming onto some of the NGOs.”

Volunteers simply show up
What to do with well-meaning volunteers is not a new problem. In every disaster, large numbers of people simply show up to help. A handbook published by California disaster officials estimates organizers can count on 50,000 “convergent” volunteers after any severe earthquake. After the Sept. 11 terror attacks, more than 40,000 unsolicited volunteers arrived at Ground Zero in New York.

In the U.S. and around the world, aid organizations are walking a fine line, trying to encourage skilled professionals who can provide indispensable assistance — and waving off those who might not be

up to the task. At the federal Center for International Disaster Information, a stern note warns the well-intentioned:

“Volunteers without prior disaster relief experience are generally not selected for relief assignments,” it reads. “Most offers of another body to drive trucks, set up tents, and feed children are not accepted.”

It’s an effort to help would-be Samaritans recognize the reality of the situation, said CIDI director Suzanne H. Brooks.

“It’s very romantic in the TV and movies,” she said. “They think it’s flying in for a weekend. They need to think of it in terms of months.”

Those best suited to help are probably already there, experts said. They’re trained crews who not only have experience working in disasters, but also in developing nations, Kirsch said. The best teams also have a command of Haitian Creole and French, if possible.

When teams arrive without those skills and without their own supplies, they drain resources that could better be used for actual victims, said Dr. Kristi L. Koenig, an emergency physician at the University of California, Irvine, who specializes in disaster response.

“Unless you’re part of a team before the disaster happens with a formal mission, you’re going to be part of the problem,” she said.

Even worse, certain volunteers have required emergency intervention themselves, Kirsch noted.

“Most people do quite well, but about 10 percent don’t,” he said. “They end up totally freaking out and having to be evacuated.”

Winter coats and high-heeled shoes?
A different but equally pressing problem is the flood of ill-advised donations that aid agencies already are facing, organizers said. A handful of “Help Haiti” food and clothing drives across the country are inspiring cringes among some workers, said Diana Rothe-Smith, executive director of the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, a coalition of agencies.

“I would strongly recommend that no donation drives be conducted unless there’s an existing organization on the ground, in Haiti, that has asked for the help,” Rothe-Smith said. “It does pile up very quickly.”

Donations of old clothes, canned goods, water and outdated prescriptions are accumulating, said Brooks. While such items sound useful, they’re actually expensive to sort, to transport and to distribute, she said. Cast-off drugs can be dangerous.

Oftentimes, the household items donated are simply not useful to the disaster victims they’re intended to help.

“I guarantee you someone is going to send a winter coat or high-heeled shoes,” Brooks said.

In fact, after the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004, aid organizers in Sri Lanka were forced to deal with donations of stiletto shoes, expired cans of salmon, evening gowns and even thong panties, according to news reports. In Florida, a truckload of mink coats showed up during the 2004 hurricane season, Rothe-Smith said, a likely tax write-off for a retailer having trouble pushing furs.

The compassion behind some donations is understandable — and laudable, she added. People see dire images on television or in news reports and they want to help.

“It seems to make logical sense to go through your own cupboard and gather those items,” Rothe-Smith said.

The reality, however, is that inappropriate donations actually do more harm than good.

“If you buy a can of peas and it costs 59 cents, it’ll cost about $80 to get it where it needs to go,” Rothe-Smith said.

Mathematics of donation favor cash
Many agencies try to motivate donors with the mathematics of the situation. Jeff Nene, a spokesman for Convoy of Hope, a Springfield, Mo., agency that feeds 11,000 children a day in Haiti, urges cash donations that allow his group to buy in bulk from large suppliers and retailers.

“When people give $1, it translates into $7 in the field,” he said. “If they spend $5 for bottled water, that’s nice and it makes them feel good, but probably it costs us more than $5 to send it. If they give us $5, we can get $35 worth of water.”

That’s a sentiment echoed by virtually every aid agency.

“I would really say at this point, honestly, right now, money is the best thing to give,” Rothe-Smith said.

Donors can find vetted agencies helping in Haiti on sites such as Charity Navigator.

Still, trying to direct the flood of compassion can be tricky, Nene acknowledged.

“Some people get a little miffed by it. They think they’re trying to help and when you don’t receive it in that attitude and spirit, they get upset,” he said.

“You just have to tread lightly. You don’t want to crush people when they’re so willing to help.”

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (picture): MSNBC

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Some of the dead in this shattered city line the roads, carefully placed garments shrouding their faces. Others are carried into the hills for quick burials. Hundreds are arrayed in a macabre tangle of limbs outside a morgue, just feet from the grievously wounded.

The living and the dead here share the same space — the sidewalks, the public plazas, the hospitals. The living are frightened of being inside in case another earthquake hits; the dead are everywhere.

On the doorstep of a pharmacy, six bodies were lined up shoulder to shoulder. On the body of one woman, covered in a sheet, rested a small bundle, the tiny leg of an infant sticking out of the wrap.

“It’s beyond description. The disaster, the damage, is just so overwhelming,” said Karel Zelenka, a Catholic Relief Services representative in Haiti. “Everyone has a scarf or something, because the smell is unbearable. … You literally have bodies all over the place.”

The international Red Cross estimates up to 50,000 people were killed in Tuesday’s earthquake. For now, few know what to do with the bodies. People say they’re being left on roadsides and doorsteps so relatives who may have survived can find them, or for families to find transportation for burials.

‘Highest regard to families’
Some families wouldn’t wait. Relatives of one woman who was killed in the earthquake dug her grave about 20 feet from the road, her body wrapped in a sheet and strapped to a door. Across the street, others dug graves and built a bonfire to keep away flies and ward off the stench.

While the odor can be overpowering, health officials sought to dispel worries about the spread of disease. Pan American Health Organization officials — speaking from Washington — stressed dead bodies are not a significant contagion danger, and cautioned against rapid mass burials or cremations.

“The management of dead bodies needs to be done with the highest regard to families, their wishes and their sensitivities,” said Dr. Jon Kim Andrus, deputy director for the Pan American Health Organization.

In front of the morgue at the Hospital General downtown, family members come to stare over hundreds of bodies covering the parking lot. A woman described the clothes of her daughter to city workers, who moved a sheet to look closely at a body. The smell of death was so strong that everybody not wearing a mask held their hands to their faces.

Nearby, the injured sit on makeshift beds, awaiting medical assistance. The living and the piles of dead are only separated by about 20 feet.

As relief organizations struggle to get supplies and aid to the survivors, few plans were being made for the dead. The international Red Cross said it would ship 3,000 body bags along with tons of aid being sent from Geneva on Thursday night.

Voodoo rituals for the dead
Meanwhile, Brazil army officials issued a statement saying many followers of the Voodoo religion would not accept the dead being touched until all of their rituals were concluded. Some experts on the faith validated the claim while others rejected it.

Voodoo, a mix of African religions and Roman Catholicism, is central to Haitian life and is widely observed in some form. The religion often has been wrongly associated with black magic or sorcery, leaving a lingering stereotype against its followers.

But suggestions that survivors are stacking corpses outside Port-au-Prince hospitals because they are waiting for a Voodoo ceremony is inaccurate, said Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, an expert on Haitian Voodoo, also spelled Vodou, in the department of Africology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

“None of what the Brazilian authorities say makes any sense,” Bellegarde-Smith said in a Thursday e-mail. “They are absolutely wrong! Most Haitians, though they believe in Vodou, are devoted Catholics or Protestants.”

Bob Corbett, professor emeritus of philosophy at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri, said most Haitians would certainly want a Voodoo priest or priestess to be at a burial ceremony.

“Relatives would want some consolation, some guidance and ritual,” he said from his St. Louis home. “But it’s clear there is a huge public health problem there with all the bodies, so it’s hard to say what people would prefer in this situation.”

Late Thursday afternoon, the sunset mingled with the concrete dust from the crumbled buildings, tinging the city in a golden mist.

On a patch of dirt on a busy street corner a woman took her last breath. She was 26. Her family said she had been injured in the quake and suffered for two days.

Her family and about two dozen passers-by crowded around. They said a prayer and gently wiped the corners of her mouth before closing her eyes and covering her with a blanket.

Her father sat at the woman’s feet. Like the rest of those in the crowd, he didn’t cry. He sat, visibly drained, seemingly distant. When a journalist asked his daughter’s name, he just shook his head.

Source (article):MSNBC

Source (picture):MEDIA.MASSLIVE.COM, TELEGRAPH.CO.UK, MASHABLE