PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Haitians are fleeing their quake-ravaged capital by the hundreds of thousands, aid officials said yesterday, as their government promised to help 400,000 more move from squalid camps on kerbsides and vacant lots into safer, cleaner tent cities.

Relatives said they pulled an 84-year-old woman from the wreckage of her home yesterday, 10 days after the magnitude-7.0 quake, but some teams were giving up the search and efforts focused on expanding aid for survivors. It had been more than a day since the last person was rescued live from the rubble.

Aid officials said some 200,000 people have crammed into buses, nearly swamped ferries and set out even on foot to escape the ruined capital. For those who stay, foreign engineers have started levelling land on the fringes of the city for tent cities, supposedly temporary, that are meant to house 400,000 people.

The goal is to halt the spread of disease at hundreds of impromptu settlements that have no water and no place for sewage. Homeless families have erected tarps and tents, cardboard and scrap as shelter from the sun, but they will be useless once the summer rainy season hits.

The new camps “are going to be going to places where they will have at least some adequate facilities,” Fritz Longchamp, chief of staff to President René Préval, told The Associated Press on Thursday.

Doctors, meanwhile, were trying to save the life of 84-year-old Marie Carida Romain, whose relatives said they freed her yesterday from the ruins of her house.

Yves Romain, a 58-year-old telephone technician, said he and his family were sleeping in front of the collapsed home when they heard moaning from inside and called neighbours for help. After 20 hours of digging with bare hands, he said, they freed his mother.

The woman, looking skeletal and unconscious, was being treated at the capital’s General Hospital. “She is very thin. She is in a state of shock and severely dehydrated,” said Dr Louis Auguste, who works at Long Island Jewish Medical Centre in New Hyde Park, New York.

He said that while she had been buried for a long time, “there were always people who defy the norm”.

Thursday was the first day since the quake in which nobody was pulled alive from the ruins, UN mission spokesman David Wimhurst said. “We all hope that others have survived and can be found, but the more days that go by without signs of life, the dimmer these hopes will become.”

Armies of foreign aid donors, instead, turned their attention to expanding their pipeline of food, water and medical care for survivors.

With extensive swaths of Port-au-Prince in ruins, more than 500 makeshift settlements with a population of about 472,000 are now scattered around the capital, said Jean-Philippe Chauzy, spokesman for the Geneva-based International Organisation for Migration (IOM). Getting them to safer quarters could take weeks.

“These settlements cannot be built overnight. There are standards that have to be designed by experts. There is the levelling of the land, procurement and delivery of tents, as well as water and sanitation,” said Vincent Houver, the IOM’s mission chief in Haiti.

The move will be voluntary and temporary, according to Elisabeth Byrs, the spokeswoman for the UN’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Geneva.

“It’s to help them in a first move. After, the people will decide if they want to stay,” she said.

Many people are just trying to get out of the capital, often back to the farms or provincial homes of relatives.

The US Agency for International Development said yesterday that as many as 200,000 Haitians have fled the capital and many more are trying to do so.

Computer teacher Daniel Dukenson walked across the capital and caught a bus to take his family from their collapsed home in a slum to crowd in with a cousin in the seaside town of St Marc, a two-hour journey away.

“I’d like to go back, but it’s going to take a lot of time for Port-au-Prince to get back on its feet. Two years, maybe,” the 28-year-old told The Associated Press by telephone. He said he hopes to make a living teaching English.

Still others have tried to flee abroad. The US Embassy yesterday turned away hundreds of people seeking a trip out on the planes that have dropped off aid. Scores of US citizens were given passes, but many were told officials were overwhelmed and they would have to return later.

Haiti’s government estimates the January 12 quake killed 200,000 people, as reported by the European Commission. It said 250,000 people were injured and two million homeless in the nation of nine million. Others offer smaller estimates.

The disaster has prompted what the Red Cross calls the greatest deployment of emergency responders in its 91-year history. Nations around the world have offered what they can: more than $500 million from European nations, money even from impoverished Chad and Congo, and a ton of tea from Sri Lanka.

The UN’s World Food Programme said it has distributed more than 1.4 million food rations — each with three meals, and has a fleet of trucks in bringing food and supplies.

“We are planning to flood the country with food,” Myrta Kaulard, the agency’s Haiti director told the AP.

To speed that flood, the US Army, Navy and Coast Guard are trying to patch up the Haitian capital’s only functional industrial pier, which is key to getting in large aid shipments as well as to Haiti’s long-term recovery.

Only four ships have been able to dock at the pier, where 15-inch-wide (40-centimetre-wide) cracks make it risky to let more than one truck work at a time, and damage is so extensive that military officials say they don’t know how long it will take before ships can dock and unload in large quantities.

“I wouldn’t even ask my workers to risk it. I don’t trust it,” said Georges Jeager Junior, a businessman who plans to shift his port operations to the northern city of Cap Haitien, a 12-hour journey over bad roads from the capital. Jeager Junior said that means prices will soar.

Damage at the country’s badly damaged main oil terminal has kept any tankers from landing since the quake, so gas stations on fuel trucked in from the Dominican Republic.

On the waterfront Thursday, sporadic rounds of gunfire echoed from the nearby downtown commercial area. Scavengers continued to rampage through collapsed and burning shops. US troops patrolled nearby to protect aid convoys, but were leaving policing to Haitian and UN forces.

At a building in the Carrefour neighbourhood, where the multi-faith Eagle Wings Foundation of West Palm Beach, Florida, planned to distribute food, stick-wielding quake victims from a nearby tent camp stormed the stores and made off with what the charity’s Rev Robert Nelson said were 50 tons of rice, oil, dried beans and salt. Fights broke out as others stole food from the looters.