 Almost immediately Port @-@ au @-@ Prince 's morgue facilities were overwhelmed . By 14 January , a thousand bodies had been placed on the streets and pavements . Government crews manned trucks to collect thousands more , burying them in mass graves . In the heat and humidity , corpses buried in rubble began to decompose and smell . Mati Goldstein , head of the Israeli ZAKA International Rescue Unit delegation to Haiti , described the situation as " Shabbat from hell . Everywhere , the acrid smell of bodies hangs in the air . It 's just like the stories we are told of the Holocaust – thousands of bodies everywhere . You have to understand that the situation is true madness , and the more time passes , there are more and more bodies , in numbers that cannot be grasped . It is beyond comprehension . " 
