Ottawa sending 1,000 more troops to Haiti
Posted Jan 17, 2010 12:42 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Ottawa is sending an additional 1,000 Canadian troops to Haiti.
The announcement came during a Sunday morning federal government news briefing.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay says the soldiers will, among other things, work to keep order in the devastated capital, Port-au-Prince, where there is growing frustration among survivors waiting for help.
Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon says more Canadians have been located in the quake zone.
The number of missing is now 1,115. That’s down from 1,362 on Saturday.
The confirmed Canadian death toll in Haiti remains at eight.
Canadians are leaving the earthquake-ravaged nation by the planeload.
About 200 arrived at Trudeau Airport in Montreal aboard two flights late Saturday night from Port-au-Prince.
They were evacuated from the quake zone by a military transport jet and an Air Canada plane.
At least one other flight is expected today.
Canadians returning home are telling tales about survivors in a living hell, waiting for aid to arrive in horrible conditions with decaying corpses in the streets.
A U.N. official says rescue workers have saved more than 70 people from the rubble.
Elisabeth Byrs says the success rate is unusually high for a U.N.-co-ordinated search operation, even if it is small compared with the scale of the disaster.
Byrs says morale is good among the 1,739 rescue workers searching through ruins five days after the magnitude-7 earthquake struck the Caribbean nation.
She says people are still alive in the collapsed buildings and might live for six days in such conditions.
