Anthony Banbury, deputy head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti, visited a quake-ravaged city in southern Haiti on Thursday where road destruction had hampered aid delivery.

Banbury, successor to Luiz Carlos da Costa who was killed in the January 12 earthquake, traveled to Jacmel, a coastal city 40 km south of Port-au-Prince.

The road to Jacmel, the fourth largest city in Haiti, was badly damaged in the devastating quake, delaying search and rescue teams and aid delivery.

"Two people were trapped in a house after the earthquake. But the rescuers didn't have any heavy equipment, so they couldn't get them out. And they died," said Banbury.

Many survivors were turning up with untreated wounds as rescue teams set up medical centers outside Jacmel's main hospital destroyed by the earthquake.

"Twenty thousand people are left without shelter. Children have been orphaned. We talked to an elderly woman whose left arm had been amputated. So those kinds of things really fill you with despair," said the deputy head of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti, known as MINUSTAH.

Humanitarian agencies such as the World Food Program (WFP) had a hard time accessing the city because of the road conditions, but they have built 33 distribution centers and delivered over 24,000 food rations a day in the area, said Banbury.

The United Nations said that water distribution is currently expanding to smaller towns and communities outside Port-au-Prince.

(Xinhua News Agency January 30, 2010)