Aid flights turned away from Haiti
By IANSFriday, January 15, 2010
Port-au-Prince, Jan 15 (IANS/EFE) Some aid-laden aircraft have been turned away from earthquake-hit Haiti due to limited space at the international airport in the country’s capital, an official said.
Haiti’s government has put a hold on further flights from the US, Federal Aviation Administration spokesperson Laura Brown said Thursday in Washington.
The force of the temblor that rocked the Western Hemisphere county Tuesday was 35 times greater than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, British geophysicist Roger Searle said Thursday.
The epicentre of the 7.0-magnitude quake was about 15 km southwest of the Haitian capital, which houses roughly 2 million people.
Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said the earthquake may have killed more than 100,000 people.
Haiti’s pleas for assistance have prompted a major response from around the world.
However, Radio Metropole complained Thursday on its website that the Haitian government “has not even established a crisis-management cell”.
–IANS/EFE
