Flow of Haiti aid increases as rescue efforts wind down

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Food, water and relief supplies are reaching more people in the capital and in hard-hit, remote areas of Haiti, U.S. military leaders said Friday, as Haitian government officials promised to relocate hundreds of thousands of people from squalid encampments to tent cities.

Search and rescue operations are winding down, with no more than 10 of the original 43 international disaster teams still looking for survivors in crumbled buildings Friday afternoon, said Tim Callaghan of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is coordinating U.S. relief and rescue efforts.

Even so, the Israeli Defense Forces said they pulled a 22-year-old man from the rubble of a three-story building Thursday — a full 10 days after the 7.0-magnitude quake leveled the nation.

With the principal seaport partially reopened — and new airfields operating in the southern coastal town of Jacmel and the neighboring Dominican Republic — the U.S. military has been trucking cargo to distribution points in the capital and airdropping supplies into remote regions.

"We want to get relief supplies off the field and out of the port and into the hands of the Haitian people," said U.S. Army Col. Charles C. Heatherly Jr.

On Friday, Cuba agreed to let all U.S. military and civilian aircraft carrying humanitarian relief for Haiti fly straight to the Guantanamo Bay Navy Base through Cuban airspace.

From there supplies will be relayed to the earthquake-stricken nation through international air corridors.

The agreement builds on an earlier week-old waiver from Havana that allowed a handful of medical evacuation flights from Guantanamo to bring U.S. citizens straight to Miami, rather than zigzag around Cuban soil.

The expansion of overflights starts Sunday. For now, all commercial and military flights from South Florida and elsewhere in the United States go around Cuba to reach this outpost on the island's southeastern tip.

Meantime, a tent city that could house 12,000 or more migrants is slowly rising at the Guantanamo base in case any Haitians are intercepted off their shore — and can't be immediately repatriated. The tent city is 21/2 miles away from the terrorist detention area. The Department of Homeland Security and a troop force from the U.S. Army South in San Antonio would handle an influx.

But the U.S. Coast Guard says photos of Haitians taking to rafts so far are victims sailing away from the earthquake-stricken capital for safe haven in rural portions of the country.