Leogane's Post-Apocalyptic Landscape

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In Léogane, Miles From the Capital and Waiting for Aid By JOSé DE CóRDOBA And CHARLES FORELLE

LÉOGANE, Haiti – Hilda Alcindor, dean of the nursing school here, has seen 5,000 patients since Tuesday's quake. She and her brigade of nurses and students have sutured countless wounds, delivered six babies and amputated a little girl's arm.

Sunday, a little relief finally arrived in the form of two volunteer doctors who set up operations inside the nursing college. A town of 50,000 just 20 miles west of the capital, Léogane has been left practically to its own resources since Tuesday's earthquake. "Everybody is talking about Port-au-Prince. What about Léogane?" asks Ms. Alcindor who returned to Haiti in 2005 after 30 years of working in Miami hospitals. "Léogane is all broken." If getting aid from Port-au-Prince's airport out to its shattered neighborhoods is difficult, bringing help to devastated outlaying areas has proven to be a monumental challenge.

Léogane's police chief, Alain Auguste, says that almost 80% of the town has been destroyed, and that there are at least 10,000 dead. Authorities say they have buried about 1,300 -- about 800 in mass graves. Mr. Auguste says Léogane has no heavy equipment like bulldozers or cranes to lift rubble and get to the bodies. "The city is completely destroyed. We have nothing. We work with our hands," he said. Léogane has practically no communication with national authorities in Port-au-Prince, where most of the aid is arriving.

To plead the city's case, the mayor drove to the capital Saturday.

The campus of the nursing college has been turned into a tent city where hundreds of survivors who have lost their houses, or are afraid to sleep in them because of recurring aftershocks, strung sheets between shaved branches of trees under a sweltering sun. "I need antibiotics, I need pain medicine, I need anti-tetanus shots," says Ms. Alcindor. She fears an outbreak of infection from the filthy conditions. "Those legs we treated Tuesday, they are falling apart," she says, standing in the middle of the refugee camp.

Scores of injured people ringed the building, clustered in patches of shade.

Joachin Esau, 22 years old, lay on his back with a gash in his shoulder and a badly swollen right leg. He had been at home when the quake hit and his foot was caught by a falling wall. "I spent the entire night under the rubble," says Mr. Esau. Neighbors found him the next morning.

Salomon Roosevelt, the principal of a now flattened elementary school, had come to the nursing school to help. "We need orthopedists and radiologists,"

said Mr. Roosevelt, wearing a smock and a surgical mask. "Nothing has been done. Nothing." Sunday afternoon a little bit of help trickled into Léogane.

In front of a United Nations compound, a dozen Argentine doctors and medics were setting up a tent for a field hospital. Three Canadian rescue workers were heading out to survey the damage and preparing for the arrival of another eight of their colleagues. "Aid is now beginning to flow into Port-au-Prince, but we are trying to get out to areas that are potentially underserved," said Chris Kaley, a Vancouver paramedic.

Write to Charles Forelle at charles.forelle@wsj.com

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