Haiti Resilience Network: January 12, 2009 7.0 Earthquake Disaster

Haiti Earthquake Leaves Thousands Dead or Missing (Update4)
January 13, 2010, 07:34 AM EST

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-13/haiti-earthquake-leaves-thousands-dead-or-missing-update4-.html

By Thomas Black and Andres R. Martinez
Jan. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, was struck by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake near the capital that destroyed buildings and left thousands of people dead or missing.
The temblor was centered 10 miles (16 kilometers) southwest of Port-au-Prince, a city of about 2 million inhabitants, at 4:53 p.m. local time yesterday, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its Web site. An official casualty count has yet to be announced and phone lines are out across the capital.
Port-au-Prince is in “total chaos,” with clouds of dust from collapsed buildings covering the city and fears that thousands may be dead, Robyn Fieser, a spokeswoman with the Catholic Relief Services in Baltimore, said after receiving reports from representatives in the country. At least 13 aftershocks with a magnitude above 4.5 have struck the area, according to the USGS.
“My thoughts and prayers go out to those who have been affected by this earthquake,” President Barack Obama said in a statement. “We are closely monitoring the situation and we stand ready to assist the people of Haiti.”
The White House statement said U.S. Southern Command, the State Department and USAID have begun working to coordinate aid for Haiti.

Pope Appeals for Aid

Pope Benedict XVI appealed to “everyone’s generosity,” in a call for financial aid for Haiti after a papal audience today in Rome.
World Bank President Robert Zoellick, in an e-mailed statement, said the bank will provide Haiti with financial assistance. The statement didn’t specify the amount of aid it might make available.
“The World Bank is ready to mobilize a team to help assess damage and losses and plan recovery and reconstruction,” said Zoellick. World Bank offices in Port-au-Prince “were destroyed but most staff have been safely accounted for,” the statement said.
Citigroup Inc.’s office building in the capital collapsed, CNN en Espanol reported, citing a company official. Jon Diat, a Citigroup spokesman, said in an e-mail he couldn’t confirm anything.
“The streets are full of debris and it’s very difficult to move about,” Simon Schorno, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in a phone interview from Geneva.
Warner Marzocchi, a seismologist at Rome’s Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, said the earthquake was “20 to 30 times bigger” than a quake that struck the Italian city of L’Aquila last April killing more than 300 people.

‘Terrible’ Building Quality

“This is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and therefore I expect that the quality of the buildings is terrible in the face of an earthquake,” Marzocchi said by phone from Rome.
Haiti, a nation of about 9.6 million people, is recovering from four tropical storms or hurricanes that killed at least 800 people in 2008.
The UN, which has a peacekeeping force of about 7,000 personnel and 2,000 police in Haiti, said its offices were damaged and that a “large amount of personnel” are unaccounted for. The force has been stationed there since June 2004, after President Bertrand Aristide left the country to go into exile.
“There is no security problem in our headquarters,” Alain Le Roy, UN under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations, said in an e-mailed statement. “But we don’t know about the rest of the city so far.”

UN Rescue Effort

Some UN troops have surrounded the headquarters building and are trying to rescue people still trapped inside, Le Roy said. “As we speak, no one has been rescued from this main headquarters, but we don’t know how many people were in the building when the collapse happened.”
Three Jordanian peacekeepers were killed and 21 others injured in the quake, Jordan’s official Petra news agency said. Brazil’s army said four of its soldiers were killed and five were injured.
Former President Aristide said the earthquake is “a tragedy that defies expression.” Aristide, in a statement e- mailed from Pretoria, South Africa, said he and his wife “stand with the people of our country and mourn the death and destruction that has befallen Haiti.”

Collapsed School

A school with children in its rooms collapsed in Port-au- Prince, according to the UN Children’s Fund, Unicef. The aid group Doctors Without Borders, or Medecins sans Frontieres, said in a statement that its 60-bed hospital in Port-au-Prince was seriously damaged. A hospital was destroyed in Petionville, a district near the city, the Associated Press reported. CNN, citing Haiti’s first lady, said parts of the presidential palace collapsed. President Rene Preval is safe, she said.
Unicef’s headquarters suffered “considerable damage,” Tamar Hahn, a spokeswoman for the fund, said by phone from Panama. “We are waiting for daybreak in Haiti to really be able to assess the extent of the damage.”
U.S. Embassy employees reported seeing a number of bodies in the street, State Department Spokesman Philip J. Crowley said in a briefing yesterday. At least two U.S. citizens, both members of the Haitian Ministries for the Diocese of Norwich, Connecticut, were trapped in a collapsed building, AP reported.

‘Serious Loss of Life’

“There’s going to be serious loss of life,” Crowley said.
Houses slipped down hills, walls collapsed and landslides left roads blocked, which will impede any response by authorities, Ian Rodgers, a senior emergency adviser at Save the Children in Port-au-Prince, said in an interview on CNN. People are digging through rubble to find loved ones, Rodgers said.
More than 100 workers from Unicef in Haiti are helping the injured and providing for children separated from their parents, said Caryl Stern, the president of the U.S. fund of Unicef in New York.
“It’s a really densely populated area. It couldn’t be worse,” said Stern, who has been in contact with Unicef workers in Haiti. “It’s going to take a big world effort.”
Fixed-line and mobile phones in the capital are out, U.S. State Department spokesman Noel Clay said in Washington.
The Netherlands pledged 2 million euros ($2.9 million) in emergency aid, a Dutch foreign ministry spokeswoman said. Germany approved 1 million euros, the foreign ministry in Berlin said. The U.K. government said in a statement it would “provide whatever humanitarian assistance may be required.”
The Inter-American Development Bank has approved $200,000 in emergency aid to Haiti, the Washington-based lender said in a statement on its Web site today.

‘Very Strong’

Rafael Nunez, a presidential spokesman for neighboring Dominican Republic, said the earthquake felt “very strong.” No damage was reported in the Dominican Republic, Nunez said in an interview with CNN en Espanol.
Haiti’s per capita income is about $560, with 54 percent of Haitians living on less than $1 a day and 78 percent on less than $2 daily, according to the World Bank.
“This is the worst possible time for a natural disaster in Haiti, a country which is still recovering from the devastating storms of just over a year ago,” Eliot Engel, a New York congressman who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, said in a statement.
Former President Bill Clinton, the UN special envoy for Haiti, said the world body is “committed to do whatever we can to assist the people of Haiti in their relief, rebuilding and recovery efforts.”

--With assistance from Jerry Hart in Miami, Edward DeMarco in Washington, Peter Green in New York, Eric Sabo in Panama City, Patrick Donahue in Berlin, Jennifer Freedman in Geneva, Flavia Krause-Jackson in Rome, Jurjen van de Pol in Amsterdam, Massoud A. Derhally in Amman and Colin Keatinge and Heather Langan in London. Editors: Leon Mangasarian, Alan Crawford.

To contact the reporters on this story: Thomas Black in Monterrey, Mexico, at +52-81-8124-0145 or tblack@bloomberg.net; Andres Martinez in Mexico City at +52-55-5242-9283 or amartinez28@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joshua Goodman at +55-21-2125-2535 or jgoodman19@bloomberg.net; Bill Austin at +81-3-3201-8952 or billaustin@bloomberg.net

The Wikipedia overview is slightly out of date, but provides a quick summary as background.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake

Desperate Haitians clamor for aid days after quake
Catherine Bremer and Andrew Cawthorne

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - Thousands of people left hurt or homeless in Haiti's earthquake spent a third night lying on sidewalks and clamored for help on Friday as their despair turned to anger and aftershocks rippled through the wrecked city.

WORLD | NATURAL DISASTERS

Governments across the world are pouring relief supplies and medical teams into the quake-hit Caribbean state -- already the poorest in the Western Hemisphere. But huge logistical hurdles and the sheer scale of the destruction mean aid is still not reaching hundreds of thousands of hurt and homeless people in the devastated coastal capital Port-au-Prince.

"These people have lost everything, They have nothing. They have been waiting for two days now. No one is helping us. Please bring us water or people will die soon," said Renelde Lamarque, who has opened his home yard to about 500 quake victims in the devastated Fort National neighborhood.

Raggedly dressed survivors held out their arms to a reporter, begging for food and water.

Tens of thousands are feared dead from Tuesday's quake and dangerous aftershocks still ripple every few hours through the city, dislodging debris and increasing the anguish of people already traumatized by death and injury on a massive scale.

A big aftershock jolted buildings at about 5 a.m EST on Friday, causing fresh alarm.

Relief workers said some aid was trickling through to people but in haphazard fashion, and they said coordination was desperately needed. "Some aid is slowly getting through, but not to many people," said Margaret Aguirre, a senior official with International Medical Corps.

But as the risk of starvation and disease increased in shattered streets strewn with rubble, garbage and rotting bodies, most Haitians said they had still received nothing.

"I haven't eaten since the day before yesterday, we've lost our house, we've nothing to eat, nobody has come, we've seen nobody, not even a minister or a senator," said Bertilie Francis, 43, who was with her three children.

"We are here by the Grace of God, nobody else," she said.

In one part of Port-au-Prince on Thursday, desperate Haitians blocked streets with corpses in a protest to demand quicker relief efforts, witnesses said.

Aguirre said aid agencies were discussing setting up a central refugee camp to try to group a multitude of victims' settlements springing up all over Port-au Prince.

"The key is the coordination. So many relief workers are just out of the picture. We want to avoid people just running round doing their own thing," she said.

PRAYERS, GROANS AND WAILS

In a sign that international relief efforts cut across ideological differences, communist-led Cuba agreed to let the U.S. military use restricted Cuban air space for medical evacuation flights carrying Haitian earthquake victims, sharply reducing the flight time to Miami, a U.S. official said.

United Nations disaster experts said at least 10 percent of housing in the Haitian capital was destroyed, making about 300,000 homeless, but in some areas 50 percent of buildings were destroyed or badly damaged.

U.N. aid agencies were to launch an emergency appeal for approximately $550 million on Friday to help survivors.

The U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti, which has lost at least 36 of its personnel in the quake, was trying to provide some basic coordination from an office near the airport.

In the capital overnight, an eerie chorus of hymns, prayers, groans and wails of mourning, mixed with the barking of terrified dogs, echoed over the hilly neighborhoods.

Bodies lay all around the hilly city, and people covered their noses with cloth to block the stench of death. Corpses were piled on pickup trucks and delivered to the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince, where hospital director Guy LaRoche estimated the bodies piled outside the morgue numbered 1,500.

Three days after disaster struck, masses of people clamored for food and water, as well as help in digging out relatives still missing under the rubble.

Angry survivors built the roadblocks with corpses as aid committed from 30 countries began arriving in Port-au-Prince in dozens of planes that clogged the city's small airport.

Shaul Schwarz, a photographer for TIME magazine, said he saw at least two downtown roadblocks formed with bodies of earthquake victims and rocks. "They are starting to block the roads with bodies. It's getting ugly out there. People are fed up with getting no help," he told Reuters.

The presidential palace, the parliament, the cathedral and many government buildings collapsed. The main prison also fell, allowing dangerous criminals to escape.

AIRPORT BOTTLENECK

U.S. forces were trying to step up operations at the airport in order to get more supplies into the country.

The Haitian Red Cross said it believed 45,000 to 50,000 people had died and 3 million more -- one third of Haiti's population -- were hurt or left homeless by the major 7.0 magnitude quake that hit its impoverished capital on Tuesday.

"We have already buried 7,000 in a mass grave," President Rene Preval said.

The Haitian Red Cross said it had run out of body bags.

Doctors in Haiti were ill-equipped to treat the injured. Relief workers warned that many more people will die if the injured, many with broken bones and serious loss of blood, do not get first aid in the next day or so.

Planes full of supplies and search and rescue equipment began to arrive at Port-au-Prince airport on Thursday faster than ground crews could unload them, jamming the limited ramp space and forcing arriving aircraft to circle for up to two hours before landing.

U.S. President Barack Obama pledged an initial $100 million for Haiti quake relief and enlisted former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to help raise more, vowing to the Haitian people: "You will not be forsaken."

The United States was sending 3,500 soldiers, 300 medical personnel, several ships and 2,200 Marines to Haiti.

The U.S. Navy said its nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson will arrive on Friday to serve as a "floating airport" for relief operations by its 19 helicopters.

Nations around the world pitched in to send rescue teams with search dogs and heavy equipment, helicopters, tents, water purification units, food, doctors and telecoms teams. But aid distribution was hampered because roads were blocked by rubble and smashed cars and normal communications were cut off..

(Additional reporting by Tom Brown, Kena Betancur and Carlos Barria in Port-au-Prince, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva and Steve Holland in Washington; writing by Anthony Boadle and Pascal Fletcher; editing by Vicki Allen and Eric Beech)

For more Information:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60B5IZ20100115

United Nations peacekeepers warned yesterday that Haiti’s capital could quickly descend into rioting if three million hungry, thirsty and traumatised earthquake survivors don’t receive emergency aid soon. The warning came as relief agencies battled to deliver tonnes of material to Haiti’s capital despite blocked roads, a clogged airport and shattered ports.

Looters have emptied food shops and scuffles have broken out among survivors fighting over scarce water as the wait for help drags on. Brazil’s Defence Minister, Nelson Jobim, warned that the Brazilian-led peacekeeping force could struggle if desperation spilled into violence. “We are worried about security,” he said.

“As long as the people are hungry and thirsty, as long as we haven’t fixed the problem of shelter, we run the risk of riots.” As the UN launched a flash appeal for $560 million (£350 million), President Obama warned of “difficult days” ahead overcoming the logistical challenge of reaching the needy.

Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, said that food and water were in critically short supply as hundreds of thousands began their fourth night sleeping out in the open.

“Logistics are extremely difficult. The airport is open, but capacity is limited. A lack of transport and fuel is also hampering efforts. Many roads remain blocked,” Mr Ban said.

“That said, the international community’s response has been generous and robust, and we are gearing up rapidly and effectively despite the challenging circumstances.”

As the 96-hour mark since the quake loomed, the UN called on countries to stop sending rescuers, a grim acknowledgement of the diminishing hope of finding survivors.

The focus will now switch to getting in emergency supplies to keep those who have already been rescued alive.

“We don’t need more disaster search-and-rescue teams,” said Elisabeth Byrs, the UN’s humanitarian spokeswoman said. “That would only clog the airport.”

Last night the United States effectively took control of the vast relief operation as six naval vessels — including an aircraft carrier to serve as a “floating airport” — and 10,000 troops headed towards the country.

Among the first distribution teams yesterday were US paratroopers who landed on Thursday night to help to secure the airport and lay the groundwork for the military mission.

President Préval of Haiti sobbed with gratitude down the phone to Mr Obama, who reached him yesterday after three days of failed calls.

He ended with a message to the American people, saying: “From the bottom of my heart, and on behalf of the Haitian people, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

In a rare thaw in relations, Cuba agreed to allow US military aircraft into its airspace to evacuate the wounded to Miami.

The concession shaves 90 minutes off the flight time from Guantánamo Bay, where casualties will receive initial treatment, to Miami where they can be taken to hospital. The only casualties to reach hospital in Miami yesterday, however, were 20 American citizens.

In Port-au-Prince, Stefano Zannini, the head of mission for Médecins sans Frontières, said his staff had been working around the clock under canvas to perform life-saving surgery on hundreds of people with dangerous open fractures. Thousands more were still awaiting help, and at least 100 had died before their wounds could be tended. “People are still coming to our structures by any way they can, in cars, on motorbikes, even being carried on doors used as stretchers,” he said. “We have thousands ready for surgical interventions.”

With the city’s tiny airport overwhelmed, aid organisations were struggling to find alternative routes to bring in vital medical supplies. Lorries bearing tarpaulins, high-energy food, water and medical supplies were beginning to reach the city by road yesterday after being flown into the Dominican Republic. With Port-au-Prince’s commercial docks destroyed by the quake, hopes of bringing sea cargo rest on the tiny northern port of Cap Haïtien — the only means by which to bring in the quantities of food required by hungry survivors.

There was relief, however, at the discovery that a badly damaged UN food warehouse had not been looted as previously believed, allowing workers to retrieve 6,000 tons of food supplies to begin distributing at first light.

For More Information:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6990401.ece

Arguments over the running of Haiti's main airport are hampering the aid effort as international troops attempt to bring lawlessness under control in the devastated capital of Port-au-Prince.

Published: 6:38AM GMT 18 Jan 2010

A leading aid group has complained of skewed priorities and a supply bottleneck at the US-controlled airport.
The Geneva-based aid group Medecins Sans Frontiers said: "There is little sign of significant aid distribution."

The "major difficulty," it said, was the bottleneck at the airport. It said a flight carrying its own inflatable hospital was denied landing clearance and was being trucked overland from Santo Domingo, almost 200 miles away in the Dominican Republic, delaying its arrival by 24 hours.
French, Brazilian and other officials had earlier complained about the airport's refusal to allow their supply planes to land. A World Food Program official told The New York Times that the Americans' priorities were out of sync, allowing too many US military flights and too few aid deliveries.
Alain Joyandet, French co-operation minister, said he had protested to Washington about the US military's management of the airport where he said a French medical aid flight had been turned away.
In response to the complaints, the general in charge said the US military was "working aggressively" to speed up deliveries. Ban Ki Moon, the UN secretary general, has also pledged to accelerate the aid effort.
Some 2,200 Marines with heavy equipment to clear debris, medical aid and helicopters, were also scheduled to join some 5,000 US troops already in the region. The aim is to have approximately 10,000 US troops in the area to participate in the rescue operation, spokesman Jose Ruiz of the US Southern Command said.
Haitians are desperate for food, water and medical supplies. In places, that desperation has led to violence, forcing police to fire on a crowd of looters. There were also reports of lynch mobs killing looters and setting their bodies on fire.
Rene Preval, the president, said 3,500 US troops would help UN and Haitian forces restore order in Port-au-Prince.
"We have 2,000 police in Port-au-Prince who are severely affected [by the quake]. And 3,000 bandits escaped from prison," he said. "This gives you an idea of how bad the situation is."
. But anger was mounting over the pace of the aid effort.
"The government is a joke. The UN is a joke," Jacqueline Thermiti, 71, said as she lay in the dust with dozens of dying elderly outside their destroyed nursing home. "We're a half a mile from the airport and we're going to die of hunger."
Water has been delivered to more people around the capital, where an estimated 300,000 displaced were living outdoors. But food and medicine were still scarce.
"This is one of the most serious crises in decades," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said as he flew into the Haitian capital. "The damage, destruction and loss of life are just overwhelming."
A reliable death toll may be weeks away, but officials fear the figure could reach 200,000.
The UN World Food Program was "pretty well on target to reach more than 60,000 people today," up from 40,000 the previous day, WFP spokesman David Orr said. But UN officials said they must raise that to 2 million within a month.
The US aid chief, Rajiv Shah, told "Fox News Sunday" he believed the U.S. distributed 130,000 "meals ready to eat" on Saturday, but the need was much larger. "We're really trying to address it," he said.
Some food was still commercially available in the city, but prices had skyrocketed beyond what most people could afford.
In a further sign of the delays, the aid group CARE had yet to set a plan for distributing 38 tons of WFP high-energy biscuits in outlying areas of Haiti, CARE spokesman Brian Feagans said Sunday. He did not say why.
Donations to the DEC Haiti appeal can be made by calling 0370 60 60 900, through the website http://www.dec.org.uk or over the counter at any post office or high street bank, quoting Freepay 1449.
Cheques payable to DEC Haiti Earthquake can also been sent to PO Box 999, London, EC3A 3AA.

For More Information:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/haiti/7016051/Haiti-earthquake-confusion-at-airport-hampers-aid-effort.html

Updated January 18, 2010

FOXNews.com
A full parking lot is to blame for the bottleneck at the airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where relief supplies after last week's massive earthquake are being stored and distributed -- if the cargo planes carrying them can land.

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Monday: U.S. troops with the 82nd Airborne Division unload disaster relief supplies in Port-au-Prince. Troops, doctors and aid workers flowed into Haiti on Monday even while hundreds of thousands of Tuesday's quake victims struggled to find water or food. (AP Photo)

A full parking lot is to blame for the bottleneck at the airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where relief supplies after last week's massive earthquake are being stored and distributed -- if the cargo planes carrying them can land.

Several complaints have been made about the number of planes diverted, and the French and Brazilians reportedly have filed specific criticisms to the State Department.

But military officials said the United States, which is in charge of the airport, is trying to move planes through the tarmac as quickly as possible. They said space constraints have presented a challenge as they work around the clock to offload relief supplies.

"It literally became, if there was a parking space open, we would get them on the ground and get them in here. Unfortunately sometimes, you got big aircraft that occupy a big spot on the ramp and we can't get them out fast enough -- and so people are having to hold to get in," Air Force Col. Ben McMullen told Fox News.

The airport has room for about a half-dozen planes to park, depending on their size, said Col. Buck Elton, the U.S. Southern Command commander for south Haiti. He said the 10,000-foot strip is accustomed to hosting three aircraft on a daily basis.

As of Sunday, five days after the 7.0-magnitude quake devastated Haiti's capital, the U.S. military, working with sparse equipment and primitive controls, has managed about 600 landings and take-offs.

"The airfield has not been closed since we started operation. It has just been full," Elton said, noting that the facility can hold about one wide-body and five narrow-body aircraft as well as three smaller aircraft at any given time.

"Any aircraft that can taxi into the grass and get off the ramp that the big aircraft need to be on, we use that option," he added.

Approximately 40 percent of the aircraft landing are military and 60 percent civilian.

Despite the complaints, Elton said just three planes were diverted on Sunday out of 67 civilian flights that arrived. The difficulty of the process has been compounded by the fact that the tower and terminal have been condemned due to the damage and all of the operations are being done in the grass between the runway and ramp.

"It's done via radio control from our controllers that are in contact with the Haitian approach control that does not have an operational radar or any navigational aids to assist the arrival of the aircraft, and with a communications link that we have back to the Haitian flight operations coordination center back at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida," Elton said.

Elton said that occasionally "improperly configured cargo" that needs to be off-loaded by hand, equipment breakage and aircraft problems have forced planes to stay on the ground past the two or three hours allotted per plane. When that happens, other planes are caught up in the air.

He added that the military is using aircraft with refueling tankers on them so when an inbound civilian plane needs to land to offload its cargo, the military plane can manage to stay in the air, then quickly come down and offload it cargo and get back up in the air again with minimal time on the ground.

For More Information:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/01/18/military-blames-crowded-parking-lot-diverted-planes-haiti-airport/

By JOSÉ DECÓRDOBA AND PETER SPIEGEL

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -This city's ruined seaport has begun taking small deliveries of emergency aid from offshore, and U.S. military forces are seeking to use other ports to relieve the tremendous pressure on the airport that has been virtually the only way into Haiti.

Maj. Gen. Daniel Allyn, deputy commander of all U.S. forces in Haiti, told reporters in a video conference at the Pentagon that the military's top priorities are getting aid delivered more widely, getting more ground vehicles to dispense supplies in the capital, and bringing equipment in to rebuild the port to allow for its "full opening."

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Dominic Nahr for the Wall Street Journal
The U.S. military plans to start repairing part of the damaged port at Port-au-Prince to 20% capacity.
Full—or even significant—operation could take a long time to restore. The seaport's main terminal, which normally handles more than 90% of the cargo entering Haiti, was destroyed by Tuesday's earthquake and is completely unusable, said U.S. Coast Guard Captain John Little, a member of an assessment team seeking to put the country's ports back to work.

That leaves only a "finger pier" normally used only by smaller boats. The earthquake tore a 200-foot hole in the middle of that 1,000-foot pier, and only one trailer truck at a time can drive out on it and unload cargo, officials said.

At best, Capt. Little said, the port may ultimately be able to handle 20% of the cargo it moved before the earthquake struck by using what's left of the smaller pier. It could gradually reach that level as the military shores it up over the next 40 to 50 days, officials said.

Kevin Sterling, a transportation analyst with BB&T Capital Markets in Richmond, Va. estimates that one typical cargo ship can carry same amount of freight as between 50 and 75 planes. More than 120 flights a day are currently landing at the Port-au-Prince airport.

Getting the port even partially operational would allow officials to speed deliveries of humanitarian aid and supplies and relieve the airport, also making it easier to resume commercial flights to Port-au-Prince. Two other Haitian terminals, used to bring in fuel, have also been heavily damaged, said Reginal Villard, a Port-au Prince shipping agent.

Relief organizations and commercial shippers are chomping at the bit to get cargo in and unloaded. On Tuesday, the Coast Guard told Mr. Villard he could unload a barge carrying 123 containers of emergency aid towed by a tugboat from Alabama through Puerto Rico to Port-au Prince. But it would have to be done gingerly, he was told.

Crowley Maritime Corp., a Jacksonville, Fla., shipper which operates throughout the Caribbean, said it will conduct a test beach landing on Friday. A Crowley ship carrying 12 containers loaded with water and ready-to-eat meals will anchor off Port-au-Prince, a spokesman said. A smaller vessel, with a crane aboard, will be waiting to unload the containers and carry the supplies to the beach.

Crowley also plans to bring a barge in by Feb. 2 and "put it on the beach to have it serve as a makeshift dock," the spokesman said.

U.S. officials said they were still conducting assessments of the main port in Port-au-Prince and other seaports and they had not yet determined when they could begin taking significant cargo. They are also reviewing how to bring in ships that can offload without using a pier.

The U.S. military is also conducting an assessment of the port of Varreux, just to the north of Port-au-Prince's main port, as a possible place to begin pumping much-needed fuel. Gen. Allyn said he expected to resume fuel deliveries through the port "in the very near future." The assessment is due to be completed in the next day or two, he said.

A Canadian frigate has also arrived in the nearby small port of Jacmel. Canadian military personnel on Tuesday began carrying the wounded to the ship, while distributing supplies from it to surrounding neighborhoods.

—Jennifer Levitz and Christopher Rhoads contributed to this article

For More Information:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703837004575013531787985668.html?mod=WSJ_World_MIDDLENews

By Robert Little
Baltimore Sun reporter
January 21, 2010

Victims stream aboard from a steady procession of helicopters as mercy ship arrives in Port-au-Prince

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - The faces of the Haitian disaster arrived Wednesday aboard the Navy hospital ship Comfort as a procession of earthquake victims, looking lost and scared, staggered off helicopters or strained to look up from their stretchers while corpsmen carried them below deck.

There was a 20-year-old man with a shattered right leg wincing; a 47-year-old woman with her arm in a splint crying; a school bus driver, burned from the tips of his fingers to the top of his head, smiling. They came from clinics and triage centers across Haiti, beginning just after sunrise and ending at dusk, shattering the ship's military and clinical sterility with the cries and smells and blank stares of human anguish.

More than 70 were aboard when the helicopters stopped flying, the first ripple of what is expected to be a torrent of patients over the next few days.

"I saw more patients in six hours today than I would normally see in 24 hours back home," said Lt. Cmdr. Dan D'Aurora, director of the Baltimore-based ship's receiving ward and division officer of the emergency department at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda.

"This is what we train for. This is what it's all about for us."

The patients were flown in by the Navy, Coast Guard or Air Force in one of the 30 helicopters available within the ship's range. Plans for a boat-based shuttle were foiled by an earthquake aftershock that flattened the pier the Comfort had expected to use and that jolted the ship as if it had hit ground. Ship officials identified an alternate boat-landing site by midafternoon.

Operations were also hindered Wednesday by the slow arrival of more than 350 crew members who are expected to bring the vessel up to its full 1,000-bed, 12 operating room capacity. Most of those crew members, expected to join the ship during the next two to three days, will arrive by boat.

But even with the slowed startup, the ship's main treatment and assessment rooms seemed on the verge of being overwhelmed. As one helicopter touched down on the Comfort's flight deck, three or more could sometimes be seen circling over Port-au-Prince harbor.

At the ship's medical receiving area, the first stop of any patient aboard, the same scene was repeated throughout the day: Elevator doors rumbled open to reveal a bewildered collection of men or women, some on stretchers, some in wheelchairs, all gaping at the mad frenzy and bright lights of the Navy's flagship of disaster response.

They wore bloody bandages and wounds wrapped in old sheets or clothing. Some had tape or stickers affixed to their shirts, bearing messages from the triage team such as "chronic renal failure" or "left leg."

By 11:40 a.m. the operating suite was already preparing for four surgeries. By noon, another two had been written on the scheduling board and more than 20 were scheduled by the end of the day. A broken ankle to reset, burns to clean, a procedure labeled simply "crani."

By early afternoon, some surgeons were calling for more operating rooms to open, a challenge before the rest of the crew arrives. The idea was resisted by others, however, because it could tie up all of the surgical teams and leave them vulnerable if an emergency patient arrived.

There was little time for arguing though, as the elevator doors kept opening.

A helicopter from the U.S. Embassy arrived to deliver a 27-year-old Frenchwoman who had been stuck in a collapsed building for days, trapped by her two crushed arms.

Then a boy in pajamas with cuts on his face; an older boy with an IV bag; a woman with a bloody bandage on her left foot; a man with a tube in his chest and failing kidneys.

"It's a 180-degree turnaround from the last mission - the sense of urgency, the desperation you sense in the patients," said Jeff Brown, a Navy corpsman from Columbia. He has been assigned to the Comfort for 2 1/2 years and served in two humanitarian missions to Haiti before this assignment.

"Last time, people wanted to come because they could cruise through the Caribbean and have fun," Brown said. "Now we're here to take care of people and make a difference, and everyone is very motivated by that."

The ship had been preparing for this day since it left Baltimore on Friday, testing equipment, unpacking supplies and holding trauma drills.

But the human reality of what the crew will face - and what Haitians have struggled with for a week - became evident on one of Wednesday's first flights.

He was a young Haitian whose crusting burns covered his head, concealing most of his features. The man told doctors and nurses that he was a school bus driver and was pumping gas when the earthquake hit - and the pump exploded. For six days his wife treated him at home by drizzling cold water over his burns, which showed signs of infection by the time he reached the Comfort.

In the ship's operating room, doctors had to make a decision. To save one of his hands, they would need to set him on a long-term course of treatment, including skin grafts, multiple surgeries and therapy. Since he almost certainly could not get that kind of care in Haiti, the alternative was amputation.

The Comfort's crew arranged an emergency medical flight that will take him to a burn center, perhaps the one at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, which treats combat injuries,

The man, who was anesthetized to clean his wounds and could not consent to having his name used, was a conspicuous example of Haiti's suffering, but hardly the only example.

As he was being wheeled into surgery, the elevators opened to reveal a man with amputated fingers and a woman who seemed to have miscarried. They were wheeled into the ship, past the seemingly lifeless baby, into spaces vacated by the old man with a neck collar and the young woman who never seemed to move.

"A number of them have been injured in the last few days by walls falling on them in structures where they were trying to sleep," said Cmdr. Tim Donahue, head of surgery on the Comfort. "It shows how dangerous Haiti still is, and how much work we have to do."

For More Information:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bal-md.hs.comfort21jan21,0,4154306.story

By SPENCER ACKERMAN 1/19/10 2:07 PM
The USS Bataan arrived in Port-au-Prince harbor yesterday and by 9 a.m., the Marines on board went ashore to prep the beach for Bataan’s mission to render aid and get supplies ashore. The medical ship Comfort is still at least several hours away from Haiti. And judging from a conference call with bloggers held by Bataan’s senior medical staff, Comfort can’t arrive fast enough.

Until Comfort arrives, Bataan offers the most medical assets the U.S. military has to offer. It has a fleet surgical team, four operating rooms, 13 available intensive care beds and 38 available ward beds. Another 87 medical personnel are supposed to link up with Bataan later today, according to Lt. Commander Seon Jones, the ship’s chief surgeon. What it doesn’t have right now are any Haitian patients. Right now, the ship’s “top priority” is to “establish a forward presence on the beach” to begin dispersing humanitarian aid, according to Cmdr. Melanie Merrick, Bataan’s senior medical officer.

It sounded from Merrick’s description like Bataan has the burden of medical expectations simply because it was able to get from its port in Norfolk, Va., to Port-au-Prince in 36 hours with a hastily enlarged medical staff to deal with the crisis. That’s ahead of Comfort, but Bataan does not have “what Comfort can do,” said Cmdr. William Wallace, the leader of the Bataan surgical team. It’s simply “the biggest thing to enter the area” from a medical perspective. Wallace added that “we are expecting to receive patients aboard Bataan.”

But as of now, Bataan is still getting its relief assets ashore. According to a multiagency briefing call about Haiti that Josh Rogin was on, the Department of Health and Human Services has “265 people on the ground, including doctors, nurses, and paramedics.” Israel and Argentina have both opened field hospitals in Haiti. Comfort, with its 1,000 beds, 5,00o units of blood and other major surgical assets, is still on its way.

“We realize medical maybe did not hit the beach running in sense that people expect,” Merrick said, “but we have a lot of assets” to contribute to the relief effort.

For More Information:
http://washingtonindependent.com/74212/dicey-situation-for-haiti-medical-aid

This is Day Ten of CBSNews.com's Haiti earthquake coverage. All times are Eastern Standard Time. For our previous coverage, see Day Nine, Day Eight, Day Seven, Day Six, Day Five, Day Four, Day Three and Day Two. And for a broader overview, see our section of full coverage.

For information on how to donate to relief organizations click here.

7:48 a.m. EDT: CBS News investigative producer Len Tepper reports there are now 38 confirmed American fatalities in Haiti, with the recovery of two more bodies from the Hotel Montana on Wednesday, according to official sources.

5:54 a.m. EDT: Adoption advocacy groups are reporting dozens of calls a day from Americans expressing interest in adopting children who have been left orphans by the quake. "The agencies are being flooded with phone calls and e-mails," said Tom Difilipo, president and CEO of the advocacy group Joint Council on International Children's Services. "The response is 'Can we help with these children by adopting them?"' The need is vast. Even before last Tuesday's deadly magnitude-7.0 earthquake, Haiti, one of the world's poorest countries, had 380,000 orphans, according to UNICEF. There is no counting children newly orphaned by the quake, but aid groups estimate the number in tens of thousands.

UNICEF cautioned in a press release earlier this week, however, that the dramatic circumstances created by the quake could encourage hopeful foster parents and relevant agencies to try and bypass usual pre-adoption checks.

"Screening for international adoption for some Haitian children had been completed prior to the earthquake. Where this is the case, there are clear benefits to speeding up their travel to their new homes," said the release.

"UNICEF joins with the Committee on the Rights of the Child, International Social Service and other concerned groups in calling on all those involved in relief efforts to ensure that they act in the best interests of children."

5:40 a.m. EDT: The U.S. has started preparing tents at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay for Haitian migrants in case of a mass exodus by earthquake survivors. A senior official says about 100 tents are up, with another 1,000 on hand in case waves of Haitians set out and are captured at sea. Rear Adm. Thomas Copeman says cots have been rounded up and latrine facilities are being tested. He commands the task force running the U.S. detention center that holds nearly 200 terrorism suspects. Any Haitian migrants would be held some 2 miles away from the detention center. (Source: AP)

From Wednesday Night: Our team of correspondents in the field continued to deliver stirring images and stories from the aftermath of the Haiti quake for the "CBS Evening News":

Dr. Jennifer Ashton reported from on board the USNS Comfort the hospital ship with 1,000 beds and eight operating rooms that reached Haiti yesterday. Everywhere on board, medical teams asked Ashton about conditions on the ground and the clinic where she's been working this week.

And Harry Smith reports on life inside a tent city for survivors. "There's a kind of commerce, a sense that life is going on somehow," he writes. "The people here have such resilience and pride. In the middle of this makeshift camp, a woman is doing her laundry clearly. And she is ironing a pair of pants."

For More Information:
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2010/01/21/world/worldwatch/entry6123149.shtml

January 22, 2010 -- Updated 1308 GMT (2108 HKT)

Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) -- Aid is reaching earthquake-torn Haiti, but getting it to the people who need it remains a challenge.
Large quantities of medications, baby formula and other relief supplies are sitting on the tarmac and in warehouses at the Port-au-Prince airport, but no one is moving it out, according to CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta.
"It's like everywhere we go, just walking through the airport, outside the airport even, people are saying, 'We need supplies,' " Gupta said.
Gupta found pallets of formula, pain medication and antibiotics standing unattended next to the runway.
U.S. military personnel in a warehouse tent at the airport gave Gupta a trash bag full of supplies to take back to a hospital he had visited earlier but couldn't explain why there seemed to be no organized system for distribution.
"There is stuff here waiting to be taken out, that's a true statement," said Air Force Col. Ben McMullen, deputy commander of the Joint Special Operations Air Component. "Is it a lot? I can't speak to it. I will tell you the reason you got it is that everyone on this side, specifically the U.S. government side, is dedicated to getting as much stuff outside as they can. ...
"It's a shame, because you would hope that everything could get out there within seconds. But that kind of infrastructure just isn't in place."
Over at the city's port, authorities pushing to clear bottlenecks hope to restore two-way traffic at the south pier sometime Friday.
Video: Haiti pier opens Video: Airlift to save a dying boy Video: Sad ending for Haiti search
RELATED TOPICS
Earthquakes
Haiti
Port-au-Prince
The magnitude 7.0 quake that rocked the impoverished nation on January 12 damaged its capital's north and south piers. Haitian authorities and the U.S. military had restored one-way traffic to the south pier, which is the smaller of the two, by Thursday.
Port-au-Prince's north pier remains unusable.
The bottlenecks have delayed food and medical aid to the estimated 3 million Haitians who have been affected by the quake.
At least 72,000 people have been confirmed dead in the quake, according to Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive.
Canadian troops, meanwhile, were working to open an airport in Jacmel on Thursday, another step that could speed delivery of relief supplies. Jacmel, a seaside town about 25 miles (40 kilometers) from Port-au-Prince, is considered Haiti's cultural capital.
Delayed relief supplies have led to at least five deaths, according to the aid group Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières.
Full coverage | Twitter updates
Working under adverse conditions with limited supplies, medical teams have been forced to improvise.
Renzo Fricke, field coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, said staffers had to buy a saw in the market so surgeons could do amputations. A CNN crew loaned a medic a pocketknife for another operation.
Lacking rubbing alcohol, doctors have used vodka to sterilize equipment and instruments. Surgical patients are receiving over-the-counter pain medicine because doctors lack stronger medication. One nurse used a string of Christmas lights as a makeshift extension cord. CNN's Elizabeth Cohen saw a belt used as a tourniquet. When that broke, a garden hose was used.
U.S. officials have acknowledged that not all aid, particularly medical supplies, has been getting through fast enough. The situation is improving, however, they said.
That offered limited comfort to some Haitians.
iReport: List of missing, found | Are you there?
"I have not eaten for two days," 32-year-old Anderson Bellegarde said Thursday. "I'm only drinking water."
Bellegarde had waited more than six hours outside a money-wiring branch. Businesses such as Western Union are starting to reopen and are attracting the longest and most visible lines in Haiti's capital, as quake survivors scramble for cash.
Sidewalks were crowded with street vendors and kiosks, and many small food stores were open. Dozens of stalls sold fruits and vegetables at a dusty market along a pocked and rut-filled dirt side street.
More than 300 aid distribution sites are up and running, a senior U.S. administration official said. More than 700,000 meals and 1.4 million bottles of water have been delivered, along with 22,000 pounds of medical supplies, said Lt. Gen. Douglas Fraser of the U.S. Southern Command.
About 120 to 140 flights a day are coming into the single-runway Port-au-Prince airport, compared with 25 a day just after the quake struck last week. More than 840 have landed since the airport was reopened, but there is a waiting list of 1,400 to come in, Fraser said.
To improve air traffic, the U.S. military said Wednesday it had obtained landing rights at the Dominican Republic's air base at San Isidro, about 135 miles (220 kilometers) east of Port-au-Prince.
Impact Your World
International aid contributions since the quake have totaled hundreds of millions of dollars. U.S. spending for relief in Haiti has hit $170 million, the federal government announced Thursday.
About 13,100 U.S. troops are in and around Haiti -- nearly 2,700 on the ground and 10,400 more offshore. Many Marines spend time in Haiti during the day but sleep on ships at night. More U.S. troops are to arrive by this weekend, bringing the total to about 4,600 troops on the ground.
CNN's Arthur Brice, Susan Candiotti, Jill Dougherty, Eric Marrapodi, Lisa Desjardins and Elise Labott contributed to this report.

For More Information:
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/01/22/haiti.earthquake/

By PAULINE JELINEK and ANNE FLAHERTY
The Associated Press
Tuesday, January 19, 2010; 8:16 PM
WASHINGTON -- American military officials are pressing ahead with a new infusion of troops in a bid to break a logjam blocking critical supplies from reaching desperate Haitian earthquake refugees.

Some 800 Marines moved ashore Tuesday in Haiti, ferrying supplies on helicopters and Humvees as the U.S. military force there swelled to as many as 11,000.

The influx of troops comes as the military struggles to distribute aid throughout the country without setting off street riots. Defense officials last week ruled out air drops directly into unsecured populated areas because of the fear of street rioting.

But in some cases, large swarms of people have kept helicopters from landing, and troops were forced to drop water bottles into the populated areas instead of distributing them on the ground.

Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman for the military mission in Haiti, said the plan remains to put troops in charge of handing out supplies once they land instead of dropping them by air into city centers.

On Monday, troops secured a field stretching 1,800 yards long so that a C-17 could drop 15,000 liters of water and 14,500 meals. The troops have distributed those rations to the population, officials said.

"We're confident that the capabilities that are needed by the government of Haiti will be provided and can be provided and sustained for as long as it's needed," said Army Maj. Gen. Daniel Allyn, the deputy commander for military operations in Haiti.

The military effort joins a massive search-and-rescue campaign led by civilian teams from around the world. Officials said late Tuesday that 90 people have been rescued.

The number might not sound liks a lot, but for those people, "it's definitely a huge success," said Joe Knerr, team leader for the Fairfax County, Va. Urban Search and Rescue.

The 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit that arrived from Camp Lejeune, N.C., includes some 2,200 Marines, with 800 of them moving ashore Tuesday into the Leogane area, which is west of Port-au-Prince.

The Marine unit joins the 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, N.C., which began arriving last week along with several Navy ships and five U.S. Coast Guard cutters. The Navy hospital ship, the USNS Comfort, was scheduled to arrive offshore in Haiti tomorrow.

Military officials said troops and supplies were arriving as fast as possible despite daunting logistical hurdles. Allyn said the military has delivered more than 400,000 bottles of water and 300,000 food rations in the past six days.

The chaotic airport was taken over by U.S. officials on Friday and is now accommodating some 120 flights a day. Allyn said a runway in the town of Jacmel will open for C-130 flights in 24 hours. Another field in the neighboring country of the Dominican Republic will also be used, though the timing remains uncertain.

The State Department on Tuesday raised the U.S. death toll in Haiti to 28. Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the government has confirmed the deaths of one U.S. government official and 27 private American citizens. And he said an unspecified additional number are presumed - but not confirmed - to have died.

On Monday, the confirmed U.S. death toll stood at 24.

Crowley said there were roughly 45,000 Americans in Haiti when the quake struck last Tuesday. He said that about half of those have dual American-Haitian citizenship.

The department also said it has opened case files on about 9,000 Americans, based on inquiries into their welfare since the quake. It said it has positively accounted for about 3,500 of the 9,000. The status of the remaining 5,500 is unknown.

For More Information:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/19/AR2010011902520.html?waporef=obinsite

The New Yorker
by George Packer January 25, 2010

Keywords
Haiti;
Earthquakes;
Haitians;
Disasters;
Death;
Corpses;
Chris Rolling

The night after the earthquake, Haitians who had lost their homes, or who feared that their houses might collapse, slept outdoors, in the streets and parks of Port-au-Prince. In Place Saint-Pierre, across the street from the Kinam Hotel, in the suburb of Pétionville, hundreds of people lay under the sky, and many of them sang hymns: “God, you are the one who gave me life. Why are we suffering?” In Jacmel, a coastal town south of the capital, where the destruction was also great, a woman who had already seen the body of one of her children removed from a building learned that her second child was dead, too, and wailed, “God! I can’t take this anymore!” A man named Lionel Gaedi went to the Port-au-Prince morgue in search of his brother, Josef, but was unable to find his body among the piles of corpses that had been left there. “I don’t see him—it’s a catastrophe,” Gaedi said. “God gives, God takes.” Chris Rolling, an American missionary and aid worker, tried to extricate a girl named Jacqueline from a collapsed school using nothing more than a hammer. He urged her to be calm and pray, and as night fell he promised that he would return with help. When he came back the next morning, Jacqueline was dead. “The bodies stopped bothering me after a while, but I think what I will always carry with me is the conversation I had with Jacqueline before I left her,” Rolling wrote afterward on his blog. “How could I leave someone who was dying, trapped in a building! . . . She seemed so brave when I left! I told her I was going to get help, but I didn’t tell her I would be gone until morning. I think this is going to trouble me for a long time.” Dozens of readers wrote to comfort Rolling with the view that his story was evidence of divine wisdom and mercy.

The earthquake seemed to follow a malignant design. It struck the metropolitan area where almost a third of Haiti’s nine million people live. It flattened the headquarters of the United Nations mission, which would have taken the lead in coördinating relief, and killed dozens of U.N. employees, including, reportedly, the mission chief, Hédi Annabi. In a country without a building code, it wiped out whole neighborhoods of shoddy concrete structures, took down hospitals, wrecked the port, put the airport’s control tower out of action, damaged key institutions from the Presidential Palace to the National Cathedral, killed the archbishop and senior politicians, cut off power and phone service, and blocked passage through the streets. There was almost no heavy equipment in the capital that could be used to move debris off trapped survivors, or even to dig mass graves. “Everything is going wrong,” Guy LaRoche, a hospital manager, said.

Haitian history is a chronicle of suffering so Job-like that it inevitably inspires arguments with God, and about God. Slavery, revolt, oppression, color caste, despoliation, American occupation alternating with American neglect, extreme poverty, political violence, coups, gangs, hurricanes, floods—and now an earthquake that exploits all the weaknesses created by this legacy to kill tens of thousands of people. “If God exists, he’s really got it in for Haiti,” Pooja Bhatia, a journalist who lives in Haiti, wrote in the Times. “Haitians think so, too. Zed, a housekeeper in my apartment complex, said God was angry at sinners around the world, but especially in Haiti. Zed said the quake had fortified her faith, and that she understood it as divine retribution.”

This was also Pat Robertson’s view. The conservative televangelist appeared on “The 700 Club” and blamed Haitians for a pact they supposedly signed with the Devil two hundred years ago (“true story”), advising people in one of the most intensely religious countries on earth to turn to God. (Similarly, he had laid the blame for the September 11th attacks and Hurricane Katrina on Americans’ wickedness.) In Robertsonian theodicy—the justification of the ways of God in the face of evil—there’s no such thing as undeserved suffering: people struck by disaster always had it coming.

At the White House, President Obama, too, was thinking about divine motivation, and he asked the same question implied in the hymn sung by Haitian survivors under the night sky: “After suffering so much for so long, to face this new horror must cause some to look up and ask, Have we somehow been forsaken?” But Obama’s answer was the opposite of Zed’s and Robertson’s: rather than claiming to know the mind of God, he vowed that America would not forsake Haiti, because its tragedy reminds us of “our common humanity.”

Choosing the humanistic approach to other people’s misery brings certain obligations. The first is humanitarian: the generous response of ordinary Americans, along with the quick dispatch of troops and supplies by the U.S. government, met this responsibility, though it couldn’t answer the overwhelming needs of people in Haiti. But beyond rescue and relief lies the harder task of figuring out what the United States and other countries can and ought to do for Haiti over the long term, and what Haiti is capable of doing for itself. Before the earthquake, Hédi Annabi declared that the U.N. had stabilized Haiti to the point where its future was beginning to look a little less bleak. Bill Clinton, the U.N. special envoy to Haiti, has sounded even more optimistic about investment and growth, and after the earthquake he pointed to Haiti’s new national economic plan as a sound basis for rebuilding.

Yet Haitian political culture has a long history of insularity, corruption, and violence, which partly explains why Port-au-Prince lies in ruins. If, after an earthquake that devastated rich and poor neighborhoods alike, Haiti’s political and business élites resurrect the old way of fratricidal self-seeking, they will find nothing but debris for spoils. Disasters on this scale reveal something about the character of the societies in which they occur. The aftermath of the 2008 cyclone in Burma not only betrayed the callous indifference of the ruling junta but demonstrated the vibrancy of civil society there. Haiti’s earthquake shows that, whatever the communal spirit of its people at the moment of crisis, the government was not functioning, unable even to bury the dead, much less rescue the living. This vacuum, which had been temporarily filled by the U.N., now poses the threat of chaos.

But if Haiti is to change, the involvement of outside countries must also change. Rather than administering aid almost entirely through the slow drip of private organizations, international agencies and foreign powers should put their money and their effort into the more ambitious project of building a functional Haitian state. It would be the work of years, and billions of dollars. If this isn’t a burden that nations want to take on, so be it. But to patch up a dying country and call it a rescue would leave Haiti forsaken indeed, and not by God. ♦

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/01/25/100125taco_talk_packer#ixzz0dWRB2jce

Solar salvation for Haiti?
Posted: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 6:33 PM by Alan Boyle

The Haitian Project
A volunteer washes the dust from last week's earthquake in Haiti off a solar array
at Louverture Cleary School, north of Port-au-Prince, to maximize power production.

Donors are gearing up to send cell phones, streetlights, water purification systems and even audio Bibles to earthquake-hit Haiti. The bad news is that the country’s power infrastructure is on the ropes, but the good news is that these particular gadgets are solar-powered. Haiti happens to be one of the countries in the world best-suited for solar power.

In the long run, that just might help the country survive. But in the short run, even solar power isn't immune to earthquakes. Over the past week, the people and the pieces of equipment that make the technology work have literally been pulled out of the rubble in Port-au-Prince and its environs.

Sometimes the news is terrible. Paul Munsen, president of Sun Ovens International, is struggling to get hundreds of stand-alone solar-powered ovens from the company's factory in northern Haiti to Port-au-Prince.

"Unfortunately, the people we were working with [in Port-au-Prince] are trapped in the rubble and presumed dead," Munsen told me. "Some of the infrastructure we had in place that would have been ideal for us to get the ovens into people's hands is severely damaged."

Sometimes the news is more hopeful.

"It's been quite an emotional roller coaster over the last few days," said Mickey Ingles, the vice president of operations for New Jersey-based Worldwater & Solar Technologies as well as the solar-power consultant for the nonprofit Haitian Project. The project operates Louverture Cleary School, a Catholic boarding school for more than 350 Haitians in a poverty-stricken suburb of Port-au-Prince known as Croix-des-Bouquets.

The quake caused structural damage on campus. Several students were injured. But today, the school's 22-kilowatt solar-power array is back in working order, and classes have resumed. Louverture Cleary can supply all its own power needs and is even serving as an aid center for the devastated neighborhood. "We have opened up our school to let neighbors in for food, shelter and water," said Tim Scordato, the Haitian Project's office manager in Rockford, Ill.

A solar-powered mobile water purification system, donated last year by the Haitian Project, was pulled from the rubble and put into service at a Red Cross aid station. Every day, the Mobile MaxPure rig is turning 30,000 gallons of contaminated city water into drinkable water, Ingles said.

"There are many water purification systems there, but they operate on diesel," Ingles told me. "Right now, diesel is in extremely short supply."

Diesel vs. sunshine
By some accounts, Port-au-Prince currently has only a two-day supply of fuel for generators. "The fuel situation is pretty dire right now," Caroline Hurford, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program, told Reuters. Every gallon of fuel that is saved through solar power can be put to good use elsewhere.

Haiti's latest troubles may make it seem as if the country has been cursed, just like Pat Robertson said. It's the Western Hemisphere's poorest country, crippled by decades of deforestation and soil erosion as well as economic mismanagement and natural disasters. But the country is blessed with sunshine - so much so that it's been on Solar Cookers International's global list of solar-power prospects for years.

Sun Ovens International
Solar cookers provide a low-cost alternative to charcoal for Haitian families. The
devices are basically insulated boxes equipped with reflective aluminum panels.

Sun Ovens International is gearing up for a leading role in the solar-powered relief effort. The company makes solar cookers that are basically insulated boxes, surrounded by strategically placed panels of highly polished aluminum. The ovens get hot enough to boil, steam, roast or bake dishes at temperatures of up to 360 degrees Fahrenheit (182 degrees Celsius).

A $40 donation buys a complete cooking kit for a Haitian family. One commercial-sized oven, capable of making 1,200 meals during an eight-hour workday, is already in Haiti - and two more are on the way. Munsen and his colleagues are just waiting for camps to be established for the homeless (who are known more formally as internally displaced people or IDPs). "Our goal will be to provide the ovens in IDP camps," Munsen said.

"The first two weeks are always totally relief, and then you get into the real development," he explained. "Until it gets into more of a development phase, there's not any sort of infrastructure for putting these technologies in place."

In the long run, the idea is to get Haitians using solar power instead of charcoal for cooking. "We find that people realize they have money to buy their kids shoes because they're not buying as much charcoal," Munsen said.

"Even prior to this, in Port-au-Prince, the majority of families spent 55 percent of their income just buying charcoal," he explained. "So the issue of having fuel to cook with has been a major problem for Haiti for years before this earthquake. I can't imagine what it's like now. We think that using the sun is going to make a great deal of sense."

Here comes the sun
Other solar-powered gadgetry could have a similar impact, during the crisis and in the years to come:

* Dutch companies and aid organizations have set up an effort to send 1,000 solar-powered mobile phones to Haiti, to be distributed by Fonkoze Financial Services. "Good communication is an absolute necessity in disaster relief, but Haiti currently has a tremendous power problem, which impedes charging mobile phones," Paul Naastepad, chief executive officer of the Intivation solar-power company, said in a statement. "The mobile network itself still functions in many instances due to backup generators, or it can be repaired much quicker than the electrical grid." Check out this report from msnbc.com's Bill Dedman to see how critical an issue cell-phone recharging has become.

* Florida-based Sol Inc. is contributing more than 100 solar-powered streetlights to the Haitian relief effort. These lights are designed to be installed in less than an hour, stay lit all night and stand up to hurricane-force winds. In the wake of the earthquake, such lights can be used to improve nighttime security in the streets of Port-au-Prince, or provide extra light for outdoor emergency clinics. The big issue is how to get the lights to the right people in a timely fashion. The first shipment went down today with Missionary Flights International.

* New Mexico-based Faith Comes by Hearing is sending Haitian churches 600 "Proclaimers" - portable, solar-powered audio players that have been loaded with the books of the Bible. The players "will be given to local pastors so people can hear God's word in their own language - Haitian Creole," spokesman Jon Wilke said. Each Proclaimer can be turned up loud enough to be heard by up to 300 people, in a country where more than a third of adults are illiterate. Wilke said "there is an immediate need for another 3,000 Proclaimers."

By Guy Dinmore in Rome
Published: January 25 2010 12:34 | Last updated: January 25 2010 12:34
Franco Frattini, Italy’s foreign minister, on Monday sought to contain the diplomatic fallout from harsh criticism of the US relief effort in Haiti made by Guido Bertolaso, head of Italy’s civil protection agency. Mr Bertolaso, who is close to Silvio Berlusconi, prime minister, slammed the US response on Sunday night, telling Italian television that the US “confuses military intervention with emergency aid” and had failed to co-ordinate with humanitarian agencies in the quake-devastated country.

“We are missing a leader, a co-ordination capacity that goes beyond military discipline,” said Mr Bertolaso, who arrived in Haiti last Friday. “It’s a truly powerful show of force, but it’s completely out of touch with reality,” he said of the US military. Speaking generally, he also criticised what he called a “vanity parade” of people trying to demonstrate the importance of their own countries’ relief efforts.

Continued
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/aa0ea5aa-09a8-11df-b91f-00144feabdc0.html

Patricia Zengerle
Tue Jan 26, 2010 9:05am EST

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - Despite the best intentions of the international community, Haitians have little faith they will see the billions of dollars in aid pledged to rebuild their earthquake-shattered country, which international monitors rate as one of the world's most corrupt.

From successful businessmen to refugees scraping to survive in squalid tent camps, Haitians said they expect that a good portion of any money sent will flow straight into the pockets of corrupt government officials.

"The U.S. government needs to come here to help the Haitian people," said Jean-Louis Jerome, a construction worker who has lived beneath tarpaulins in a park with nine relatives since their house collapsed during the January 12 earthquake.

"If you give the aid to the person at the top, he will just put it in his pocket."

Transparency International, a group that studies government corruption, rates Haiti's government as one of the world's most corrupt and least effective, despite efforts by President Rene Preval to combat the chronic problem.

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive was in Canada at a meeting of a dozen nations to assess Haiti's immediate needs and develop a strategy to rebuild the country after the devastating earthquake, which killed up to 200,000 people and left the capital city and other areas in ruins.

The donors in Montreal decided on Monday to hold an international aid pledging conference at U.N. headquarters in New York in March. Aid pledges to Haiti have already mounted into the billions.

Clifford Rouzeau, co-owner of three restaurants in the Haitian capital, has been distributing free food to more than 1,000 people every day instead of reopening. He said he hoped the crisis would end Haiti's long history of government theft.

"I'm hoping. I've got my fingers crossed. The people here deserve better than they actually have," he said.

"You have a government that steals everything and won't give anything back to the country. You have a government that doesn't feel it necessary to put police out in the street. Do something! Put canteens all over. Just do something."

COMBATING CORRUPTION

Cabinet members, who had only been in place for two months before the quake, insist things have changed despite years in which international aid seemed to fizzle before doing anything to ease rampant poverty in the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation.

"They (the people) need food, they need housing, they need to send their children to school, surely the government people would not be so bad as to take that money," Trade and Industry Minister Josseline Colimon Fethiere told Reuters in an interview this week.

"After so big a catastrophe, that the money would not go where it needs to go would be impossible," she said.

Supporters of Preval point to a number of efforts to combat corruption since he began his term in 2006, and international observers give him credit for finally making a dent in the problem.

"The leadership of President Preval ... has shown a very strong will to fight corruption," said Richard Coles, a member of one of Haiti's leading business families, whose assets include several textile assembly plants.

"The drive of the head of state is not money," he said. "Right below, it is much more difficult to control."

(Editing by Patrick Markey and Vicki Allen)

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U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says some members of the international press 'misconstrued' her country's military and civilian response to provide aid to Haitians who desperately need it
VOA News 26 January 2010

Clinton told U.S. State Department employees Tuesday that some members of the international press "misconstrued" her country's military and civilian response to provide aid to Haitians who desperately need it. There are currently more than 15,000 U.S. troops in and around Port-au-Prince, with more on the way.

Clinton also said the United States used "development and diplomacy together" in its response to the disaster.

Separately, the head of the U.S. military relief effort in Haiti said Haitians throughout the capital have welcomed U.S. troops, and that the U.S. has delivered more than 1 million bottles of water and 1 million pre-packaged meals.

As many as 1 million people are homeless in Port-au-Prince alone, and many are in desperate need of aid, following the January 12 earthquake that killed an estimated 200,000 Haitians and destroyed much of the capital.

Lieutenant General Ken Keen also says the U.S. and other agencies plan to start building a hospital in the next few weeks to begin transferring patients from a navy hospital ship, USS Comfort, for longer-term care. He said they hope to eventually increase the hospital's capacity to 5,000 beds.

Haitian President Rene Preval has called for 200,000 more tents to house the many people still homeless from the earthquake.

Health Minister Alex Larson says the government is trying to relocate as many as 400,000 residents to temporary tent camps in place outside the ruined city.

Non-governmental relief agencies, as well as U.S. military personnel and United Nations peacekeepers, are struggling to deliver desperately needed food, water and medical supplies. U.N. peacekeepers at one distribution site fired warning shots in an attempt to pacify starving Haitians who threatened to overrun the site.
Some information for this report was provided by AFP.

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By Peter S. Green and William Varner

Jan. 28 (Bloomberg) -- “Urgent” relief operations in Haiti are ending as aid deliveries are satisfying most immediate needs, United Nations and U.S. aid officials said.

“We are out of the urgent phase,” Dr. Henriette Chamouillet, head of World Health Organization operations in Haiti, told reporters on a videoconference yesterday. French rescuers pulled a teenage girl, moments from death, from under the rubble of a home yesterday, the Associated Press reported, citing Paul Francois-Valette, a French paramedic.

International efforts are shifting toward helping sustain Haitians, including the estimated 800,000 residents of the capital Port-au-Prince left homeless by the Jan. 12 quake. About 250,000 people have already left the city for the countryside, and locally grown food is beginning to arrive in the capital, said David Wimhurst, a UN peacekeeping mission spokesman.

French rescuers rushed Darlene Etienne, 17, to a military field hospital and then to the French military hospital ship Sirroco, after extricating her from under a collapsed structure in the capital near St. Gerard University, the AP reported.

Food prices in the capital are falling, Wimhurst told reporters on a videoconference yesterday from Haiti, as relief shipments add to the city’s stocks. Oxfam International said it had started distributing cash rather than food because local markets are stocked well enough, while many residents lack money to buy food.

Col. Rick Kaiser, commander of the U.S. Army’s 20th engineering brigade, said drinking water supplies had been restored and the electrical grid may return to operation within several weeks.

Amid reports of a bottleneck at Port-au-Prince airport, where the UN said more than 1,000 flights are waiting for permission to arrive, U.S. State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid said the flow of aid is exceeding delivery capacity.

No Capacity

“There isn’t capacity to bring in all the supplies that are offered,” he said.

Delivering aid to some pockets is still problematic, said Duguid, particularly where large groups of people depend on a single aid delivery point. He said rumors of shortages at those locations have created some of the violence that has been videotaped and broadcast on television.

Haiti’s hydroelectric generators should be operating within two days, and within weeks the power grid should begin supplying Port-au-Prince, said Kaiser. Even before the earthquake, about a third of the city’s buildings were powered by generators, meaning the city is not without power, he said.

‘No Problem’

“There’s not a water problem,” Kaiser said. Drinking water is being distributed from 130 water trucks and at 80 distribution points. Haitians typically got their drinking water from trucks and kiosks even before the quake, he said.

“Sewage and sanitation are much different than in urban American society,” Kaiser said. “For those Haitians who used a slit trench, that system is operating the way it did before” the quake.

Large camps of displaced and homeless people shouldn’t be allowed to stand for long, said Melissa Winkler, a spokeswoman for the International Rescue Committee, a New York-based aid group working in Haiti.

“Once you put up a refugee camp, it’s hard to take it down,” said Winkler. “It becomes an excuse for not erecting more permanent structures and increases the dependence on international aid.”

The IRC would like to see more cash-for-work programs such as those started this week by aid group Oxfam and the UN, that pay Haitians to clear rubble, injecting cash into the economy, she said.

With at least three-quarters of the schools in Port-au- Prince destroyed, “kids are not going back to school anytime soon,” said Winkler.

‘Death, Destruction’

Now that most have received the acute medical care they need, thousands of children orphaned by the quake will need support and counseling, and to be placed with local families, said Winkler. “They have seen so much death and destruction -- it’s bad.”

The International Monetary Fund yesterday approved an additional $102 million in emergency aid to support reconstruction. Haiti will be allowed to draw on a total of $114 million by the end of the week, the largest amount made available to the Haitian government since the temblor, the Washington-based IMF said in an e-mailed statement. The emergency assistance is interest free and repayments will be postponed for at least five-and-a-half years, the IMF said.

“When the port is operational again fully, exports can resume,” Corinne Delechat, the IMF’s mission chief for Haiti, told reporters on a conference call. She said 80 percent of Haiti’s textile factories are capable of resuming production.

Delechat said the IMF emergency funds will “be used to import urgently needed equipment” such as computers and communications gear. “The government has a fairly clear of idea of what needs to be done,” and the Haitian central bank is operating well enough to help distribute the funds, she said.

To contact the reporters on this story: Peter S. Green in New York at psgreen@bloomberg.net; Bill Varner at the United Nations at wvarner@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: January 28, 2010 04:12 EST

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Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) -- A massive food distribution coordinated by the World Food Programme, international aid agencies and the Haitian government was under way Sunday in the quake-ravaged capital.
WFP rolled out food at 16 distribution points across the city, the United Nations agency said.
Only women were given tickets to collect a 25-kilogram (55-pound) bag of rice per family. In all, 42 metric tons of rice will be distributed each day over the next two weeks.
At Champs de Mars, the city's central plaza that has turned into a sprawling makeshift camp for the displaced, women formed a long line that snaked up to trucks carrying the rice.
One by one they stepped up and walked away with burlap bags full of rice on their heads. Smiles blossomed on some faces.
U.S. soldiers were out in force to guard against chaos.
"There was no way we could do this without them. There's no way we could push back people without the troops," said Jacques Montouroy, a logistical planner for Catholic Relief Services, one of eight aid agencies participating in the two-week food plan.
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WFP spokesman Marcus Prior said the global food agency will work with its aid partners to ensure that men in need of assistance are not excluded. Women are receiving the food vouchers because they tend to be responsible for the household food supply, Prior said.
"Our long experience in food distribution tells us that by delivering food into the hands of women, it is more likely to be redistributed equitably among the household -- including the men," he said.
Montouroy said most Haitian men have someone -- a wife, a sister, a mother or girlfriend -- who will be able to provide them with food. He said it was safer to deliver the rice to the women.
But things didn't sit well with some men.
"What about me? I didn't get anything. I need food," said Johnny Sanon Stevenson. "Many people could not participate."
With tight security, it was impossible for crowds to enter cordoned-off areas where the food trucks were emptied. The WFP said the 16 fixed sites are a key step in establishing food security.
Full coverage
At the central plaza, Master Sgt. Ranny Lewis helped a woman carry her bag of rice and then led women waiting in line in singing "Glory, Glory Hallelujah."
Lewis, a native of Antigua who serves in the 478 Civil Affairs Battalion, said gospel was the lifeblood of the Caribbean. Song was a way to overcome frustration and calm fears, he said.
Lewis said it was a dream come true for him to be able to help the people of Haiti in their greatest hour of need.
"This is the ultimate civil affairs mission," Lewis said. "This is where the rubber meets the road. It was difficult to control my tears. It brings me home, to my roots. I was one with the people."
WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran said the Haiti earthquake was the "most complex challenge" the agency has confronted.
"But this distribution system will not only allow us to reach more people, it will give us the qualitative step we need to facilitate the delivery of all kinds of humanitarian assistance in the weeks and months to come," Sheeran said in a statement.
The missing, the found, the victims
The food aid plan involves at least eight private humanitarian agencies: Samaritan's Purse, Catholic Relief Services, CARE, World Vision, ACTED, Save The Children, GOAL and ADRA.
"Together with our NGO partners we are working with the local authorities, churches and other civil society organizations to ensure that all male-headed households and others with special needs are not excluded from these distributions," Prior said.
Details of the plan were finalized at a meeting attended by WFP, the aid agencies and senior members of the Haitian government, said Ken Isaacs, vice president of programs for Samaritan's Purse.
He said those attending the meeting were given coupons, which were being handed out to needy families in the districts drawn up around each distribution point.
The two-week effort aims to reach two million people in Port-au-Prince but does not expand to those living in other quake-devastated cities like Leogane.
Aid distributions to outlying areas will continue, Prior said.
"Up until now the nature of this emergency has forced us to work in a 'quick and dirty' way simply to get food out," Sheeran said. "This new system will allow us to provide food assistance to more people, more quickly through a robust network of fixed distribution sites."

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http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/01/31/haiti.food.aid/