In Leogane, Haiti, rebuilding starts with scavenging

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Major earthquake hits Haiti

This gallery collects all of our photos of the crisis in Haiti, starting with the most recent images and going back to the first photos that emerged after an earthquake hit the impoverished nation Jan. 12.

» LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY

On the edge of Leogane, where 134,000 people once lived, U.N. peacekeepers closed a road so a small plane could land with supplies. A human corpse burned on the dusty shoulder.

After a few hours in the city, it is hard to see how any but a tiny fraction of its homes and buildings will remain standing. The United Nations estimates that up to 90 percent of the city's structures suffered heavy damage or were destroyed.

Already, most survivors have moved into the streets, with tent cities filling everything from soccer fields to median strips.

Buth said one shipment of water had arrived, although no one in town appeared to be aware of it. Supplies of essentials are dwindling fast. Men with plastic jugs waited impatiently for a chance at what little fuel remains at the Canaan gas station. A $5 bag of rice sells for $10, and survivors are spending much of their time finding the ways and means to feed families.

"Any money we have we spend on staying alive," said Guifaud Frederic, 35, whose brother was killed when his house collapsed.

Frederic's pharmacy fell, too, and he has built a shelter in a park where he lives with his wife and 1-year-old daughter.

"Most everything coming into this country right now stays in Port-au-Prince," he said. "I don't think we'll see any of it."

Along Grande Rue, the main commercial strip, the collapsed grocery stores have been stripped bare. A church trimmed in pale blue crumpled into the street, and a web of electrical wires loops dangerously overhead, low enough that men on motorcycles duck to avoid them. There is no electricity or running water.

Getro Surin, 26, worked in the hot morning sun on a pile of wood and tin sheeting of what had been a gingerbread-style home, using a hammer to pound apart boards. No one has seen the town's mayor since the quake, he said, and only his deputy has appeared to urge survivors to be patient for aid to arrive.

Surin said he couldn't be patient anymore. He works for a local nonprofit agency, and he and three colleagues went to work Monday collecting from the ruins any useful materials needed for shelters.

"Even in good times, they don't care about the provinces," he said. "They're not going to care now."

Thousands of people died here in the quake, and the bodies of Girard Dessources and son Patrico, 7, are still entombed in the rubble of their home on the corner of Grande Rue and Rue d'Enfer.