Local eye on Haiti

Local eye on Haiti
Downtown Express freelance photographer Tequila Minsky captured some of the first images of the devastation in Haiti Tuesday afternoon. “This is Katrina meets 9/11,” Minsky told Downtown Express in an e-mail, which she sent through a tenuous Internet connection from a country that has no electricity. Minsky, a Soho resident, travels frequently to Haiti, and she was in her hotel room in Port-au-Prince when the quake struck. She immediately began shooting photos, capturing the collapsed buildings and dust-covered dead. The injured are being carried through the streets wrapped in sheets or strewn on makeshift stretchers, and the hospitals are so overwhelmed and damaged that they are turning people away. Makeshift tent cities have emerged in the public parks, parking lots and the streets, as those who have lost their homes seek shelter. “There is a lack of leadership, no visible Haitian government or police presence or U.N. in the town center,” Minsky wrote. “Plenty of bodies on the street and people are buried in buildings and still alive and there is no institutional assistance, the only ones helping are community, young men with crow bars.”