NGOs: US must put aid before military

Airdrops of water supplies have only just begun to get underway and the US military is continuing to prevent planes carrying aid supplies from landing in Port-au-Prince and Jacmel, the largest two cities devastated by the earthquake.

A USA Today report on Tuesday stated that the US had only airlifted 70,000 bottles of water into Port-au-Prince since the earthquake struck last week.

Three million people are estimated to be in need of water and other aid.

Founder and director of Haiti-based aid organisation Konbit pou Ayiti Melinda Miles said: "Right now, the US is blocking aid.

"There should be better co-ordination so that all actors ready to deliver aid - other governments, agencies and NGOs - are able to do so."

Established aid groups who have a long history of working in Haiti have suddenly found themselves unable to deliver urgently needed medical, water and food supplies because the US military will not grant them access to ports and airports.

Groups ready to deliver aid to Jacmel - the fourth-largest city in Haiti - have been told that they would receive no clearance to land there from the US military, even though they already have both aid supplies and the means for distributing them.

Aid groups also report that outside Port-au-Prince there are places where quake survivors have fled and where the infrastructure is capable of receiving airdropped aid.

But many of these areas are not being utilised for airdrops.

The quake death toll is now estimated at 200,000, according to Haitian government figures, with 80,000 buried in mass graves.

In the sparsely populated region of Titanyen, north of Port-au-Prince, burial workers said that the macabre task of handling the never-ending flow of bodies was testing them to the limit.

Foultone Fequiert, his face covered with a T-shirt against the overwhelming stench, said: "I have seen so many children, so many children. I cannot sleep at night and if I do, it is a constant nightmare."

Workers say that they have no time to give the dead proper burials or follow pleas from the international community that bodies be buried in shallow graves from which loved ones might eventually retrieve them.

"We just dump them in and fill it up," said Luckner Clerzier, who was helping guide earth-moving machines that cut long trenches into the earth, readying them for more corpses.