Helicopters provide birds-eye view of Haiti's demise (News Feature)

By Mike McCarthy Jan 22, 2010, 5:52 GMT

Port-au-Prince - A US Navy helicopter flying above Haiti offers a birds-eye view of the devastation that last week's earthquake unleashed on the capital Port-au-Prince.

The city's downtown is flattened. All that remains are piles of rubble from buildings that came tumbling down in the magnitude-7 quake on January 12, killing tens of thousands of people.

In the less damaged outskirts, most of the buildings that were once home to the city's 1.9 million residents lie in ruins. Many of the structures still standing appear uninhabitable, and with aftershocks still rocking the nation, venturing indoors could be deadly.

Tent cities were popping up, some small, others quite large, and there was a small volume of vehicle traffic on some of Port-au- Prince's larger streets.

The US helicopters buzzing Haiti's skies are part of a massive international relief operation to bring food, water and other humanitarian goods to as many as 3 million suffering people. Helicopters and planes were ferrying aid from ships anchored offshore and the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

At the city's airport, dozens of Navy helicopters were landing in open fields, delivering troops and relief workers and tons of supplies. On Thursday, the airport hosted 70 flights from the USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier circling off the coast.

The helicopters would land, met by dozens of sailors and soldiers who formed lines to toss shuffle boxes of food rations from the UN World Food Programme, as the rotors kept spinning. Other helicopters dropped in, and again the troops went to work, loading the 'birds' with supplies to be flown to distributions centres throughout the Port-au-Prince.

A group of three reporters embedded with the US military joined a short flight to a secure distribution centre along a hillside, once home to a golf course. Upon landing, soldiers from the Army's 82nd Airborne rushed to unload the helicopter. The water and food was to be delivered to waiting Haitians, held back by a fence to maintain order.

Within minutes the helicopter was back in the air, returning to the airport to pick up more supplies.

Cargo planes were touching down at the airport at a brisk pace, an estimated 150 a day. In addition to planes sent by relief organizations, US military aircraft were predominant. Among others spotted were planes from Venezuela, Brazil and Israel.

Haiti asked the United States military to take control of the airport after the quake, allowing a vast expansion from its pre- earthquake workload of 15 flights a day.

From the air, the waters off Haiti are dotted with dozens of ships including the USNS Comfort, a naval hospital that has treated at least 100 Haitians since arriving earlier this week.

The Navy's helicopters were hopping from ship to ship, delivering personnel, supplies and injured Haitians.

The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson staged 15 medical evacuations within two hours on Thursday, the most on a single day since it arrived last week. Some of those quake victims were flown to the Comfort, though at least one patient didn't survive, a Navy spokeswoman said.