After hours of painstaking digging through the ruins, a team from Florida unearthed a seven-year-old girl, a man aged 34 and a 50-year-old woman in the ruins of a store as dawn broke in the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Later hundreds of rioters ransacked Hyppolite market in the heart of the devastated city as survivors besieged hospitals and make-shift field clinics, some carrying the injured on their backs or on carts.

Police reinforcements descended on the market armed with shotguns and assault rifles and one rioter, a man in his 30s, was fatally shot in the head, an AFP photographer said.

The church bells lay eerily silent Sunday over the ruined Haitian capital, but the faithful still came in droves praying for solace in the darkest hour of this deeply-religious nation.

"I want to send a message of hope because God is still with us even in the depths of this tragedy, and life is not over," said father Henry Marie Landasse as he prepared for Mass at the main cathedral.

Only the facade of the once proud building stood over the ruins around it, felled by the powerful 7.0-magnitude quake which struck on Tuesday.

Arriving in Haiti to survey the destruction for himself, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the quake was the worst humanitarian crisis to face the world body in decades.

Battling emotional and physical fatigue, rescue teams continued their grim task in the knowledge that the likelihood of finding more survivors was fading with every passing hour.

The US general running the military relief effort vowed to redouble efforts after 70,000 bottles of water and 130,000 food rations were distributed on Saturday.

Asked about toll estimates as high as 200,000, Lieutenant General Ken Keen said no one could know for sure but such figures were a "starting point" and the international community feared the worst.

Between 20,000 and 30,000 people died just in the town of Leogane, west of the capital, according to UN officials. The Haitian government has estimated about 50,000 dead so far across the country.

"Clearly, this is a disaster of epic proportions, and we've got a lot of work ahead of us," Keen said.

Water purification units that can process 100,000 liters (26,417 gallons) of clean water per day were being rushed to the scene as the US worked to open badly damaged ports needed to deliver vital fuel and supplies.

The US military has been relying mainly on helicopters deployed from the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier.

The Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) aid group said that when it opened an emergency hospital at Carrefour, a poor district near Leogane on Saturday, crowds arrived almost immediately.

"Patients arrived on handcarts or on men's backs," said MSF emergency coordinator Hans van Dillen.

"There are other hospitals in the area, but they are already unable to cope with the number of injured and have limited resources of personnel and medicines and equipment."

MSF said their doctors and surgeons had been working around the clock, amputating limbs and performing caesarian sections on pregnant women.

Another French aid group, Medecins du Monde, said it would have to amputate hundreds of people whose limbs had been crushed in the earthquake even though its doctors had no electricity to work by.

Most bodies were being dumped into mass graves outside the capital to prevent the spread of disease.

Some 43 international teams comprising 1,739 rescue workers and 161 dogs have already scoured 60 percent of the worst affected areas hit by the quake. About 10,000 American troops are being sent to assist and secure the stricken areas and should all be in place by Monday.

UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs told AFP that 12 more people were pulled out alive from debris on Saturday, taking the total to more than 70 since the teams started working.

"We don't give up hope to find more survivors," stressed Byrs. "The morale of the rescue team is very high despite the hardship."

Byrs said the way buildings had collapsed left "sufficient void spaces that allow for trapped victims to remain alive.

"There is still hope. The conditions are very favorable. It's exceptional and thank God for that," she said.

But Rami Peltz, a rescuer with an Israeli team, said: "Today is the last day that I think we will be able to find survivors, mainly because of dehydration."

Desperation in Haiti as scale of disaster grows
Port-Au-Prince (AFP) Jan 16, 2010 - Desperate Haiti quake survivors pleaded Saturday for vital supplies amid anger over the chaotic aid effort, while the true extent of the disaster beyond the capital began to emerge.

Four days after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake brought death and misery on an unprecedented scale to the impoverished and dysfunctional Caribbean nation, aid was trickling in but failing to reach many of those most in need.

US helicopters crews flew in and unloaded boxes of vital supplies as massive queues formed at distribution points where the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) handed out high-energy biscuits.

An AFP journalist witnessed one US helicopter dropping a half-dozen small cartons into a stadium of starving Haitians, some brandishing machetes as they fought for the items.

As the fate of whole towns and villages around the capital in western Haiti remained unclear, the United Nations said it had never before faced such a humanitarian catastrophe.

"We have never been confronted with such a disaster in the UN memory. It is like no other," Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told AFP in Geneva.

The destruction found Saturday in the town of Leogane, just 17 kilometers (10 miles) west of Port-au-Prince, was staggering -- street after street of homes and businesses torn apart.

"It's the very epicenter of the earthquake, and many, many thousands are dead," said WFP spokesman David Orr. "Nearly every house was destroyed here. The military are talking about 20,000 to 30,000 dead."

The latest overall toll from the Haitian government is at least 50,000 people dead and 1.5 million homeless, but those figures could soar once the full extent of the tragedy is known. Early estimates had spoken of 100,000 dead.

The UN said increasing numbers of Haitians were trying to cross the border into the Dominican Republic, to the east, and reported a surge of quake survivors fleeing to northern cities.

Crammed onto overflowing buses or on foot, thousands fled the flattened capital where the stench of decomposing bodies hung in the air and fears grew of angry riots.

"The streets smell of death," said Talulum Saint Fils, who sold her jewelry for one-way bus tickets for her husband and children out of Port-au-Prince.

"I'd go to any place but away from this city," she told AFP. "There is no assistance of any kind, and our children simply cannot live like animals."

There were complaints of major coordination problems at the US-controlled airport in Port-au-Prince, the main destination for aid flights.

French Secretary of State for Cooperation Alain Joyandet said he had lodged an official complaint with the United States after a French plane carrying a field hospital was turned away. This was later denied by his own foreign ministry.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton became the highest-ranking US official to visit Haiti since the quake and highlighted the urgent need to clear logistical hurdles.

"As President (Barack) Obama has said we will be here today, tomorrow and for the time ahead," she told Haitians.

"You have been severely tested, but I believe that Haiti can come back even stronger and better in the future."

Despite obvious organizational failures, a significant amount of aid was getting through, either through Port-au-Prince airport, by road from the Dominican Republic or from US helicopter flights.

Red Cross coordinator Mauricio Bustamante said the group had sent 15 planeloads of personnel and humanitarian aid, while a fleet of 19 choppers made regular air drops.

But after isolated reports Friday of machete-wielding gangs terrorizing survivors, there were growing signs Saturday of despondency and unease in a country with a checkered past of rioting and unrest.

Two Dominicans were seriously wounded after being shot Saturday as they handed out aid, local media in the Dominican Republic reported.

Exhausted police fired in the air in a vain attempt to scare off armed looters pillaging shops in the capital.

Barricades of burning tires, rubble and corpses blocked a main road out of the city as residents called for the dead bodies to be removed.

"They already took some bodies away, but there are more, many more," said Charles Weber, a 53-year-old voodoo priest in the crowd surrounding a roadblock.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon confirmed Saturday the death of his Haiti mission chief, Hedi Annabi, as the body faced its biggest ever loss of life with 40 dead and close to 330 unaccounted for. Ban was to visit Haiti Sunday.

The UN Security Council will meet Monday to discuss coordination of the international aid operation.

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