So, I think what we have in Haiti is the definition of "Worst Case Scenario" for large scale emergencies. Katrina was a fender-bender by comparison and at every possible level from the scale of the destruction to the inability of the locals to do anything at any level to prepare for it.

As I look at the media - and the cover of todays NY Daily News literally brought me to tears (see slide #52 here - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...ST2010011401110 )

- I am compelled to bring to the attention of this list some of the captions I've read from disturbing images:

"A Haitian man tries to rescue a teacher trapped amid the debris of the earthquake as he crawls past a deceased schoolgirl at Ecole St. Gerard."

"In the period before intensive relief efforts hit Haiti, residents are forced to seek refuge from the earthquake's effects wherever possible."

"Men remove the body of a girl from the ruins of a building in their Port-au-Prince neighborhood. Haitians frantically dug out family members by hand and piled bodies on street corners, as clusters of bloodied and dazed survivors pleaded for help."

"Survivors stand on the roof of a demolished house in Port-au-Prince. With thousands of people missing, dazed survivors in torn clothes wandered through rubble, as more than 30 aftershocks rocked the Haitian capital where more than two million people live, most in the grip of poverty."

"People come to the aid of a wounded man. Thousands of people gathered in public squares late into the night, singing hymns and weeping."

So - what's missing from these stories?

Well, the looting, the violence for one.
Where is it? This is a poor nation - the prison collapsed and the violent inmates escaped. They have a military that's just barely above a mob of thugs, yet (so far) no widespread violence or reports of localized incidents.

What I've been seeing is people with nothing more than their hands pulling concrete off of people. The next year is going to be a hell of proportions we can't imagine - I have a friend who has done aid work down there and on a bright sunny day, it's a hellish existence, so now it's something beyond what we can imagine. But it seems that people are helping people.

Gruesome and sobering.

We think we have to stockpile a years worth of food, medicine and packs full of hi-tech gadgets and emergency gear and here the people of Haiti are showing the rest of the world what real survival is all about - making do with what you have and what you know.


Let's hope it continues. I looked through the photos and saw a lot of people still in shock. But I also saw a lot of desparation. Wide spread devastation + Interrupted services + desperate population + planeloads of supplies poorly and/or unevenly distributed = potential for disaster.

According to the UK Telegraph, widespread looting has been occurring. You can't escape human nature.

One particularly nasty quote from the article:
Thieves were blamed for starting at least one mass panic in the city's central square during the night, spreading rumours that a tidal wave was coming so they could steal the belongings left behind by hundreds of fleeing people.

-Blast

I think that depends on the response from the International NGOs and especially the response from the US Government and US military. There are already French, Cuban and Norwegian SAR/Medic teams on site with many more international teams on route.

What is a little unsettling at the moment from media reports is the fact that the US military is sending 3,500 Soldiers and 2,200 Marines into Haiti. No doubt they will go in heavily armed as their initial mission will no doubt be a security one. I doubt the 82nd Airborne know very little about setting up triage centres and extraction of survivors from collapsed buildings. Having heavily armed US Marines standing on street corners sipping from their canteens, whilst looking on at the desperately thirsty locals as they pick away at the rubble along with the international NGOs could just be the beginning. I really hope I'm wrong on this one. The US military doesn't have an inventory of Blue Helmets and has never put them on and they aren't about to start.

I have this horrible feeling that it can only get worse, much worse.

'Looting' after a disaster of those dimensions could probably be considered 'survival mode'. Like we say here, you do the best you can with what you've got.

Most of the people there are desperately poor -- what have they got to steal? Food? Water? A shirt that isn't covered with the blood of family members? I think we can safely assume that the 'looters' aren't stealing big-screen TVs and Ipods. If there's food, water and bandages in a local store, should they go after it? Wouldn't you? Remember, this is a country where close to 65% of the people are so poor that they are eating mud to stay alive.

Haiti has virtually no money, no real emergency infrastructure, no plans, little equipment, few medical supplies or trained people. I doubt that they have much in the way of heavy equipment like cranes for lifting debris, or training to avoid further building collapses as they search for buried people.

Looting under these conditions? YEAH! It's called 'survival'.

Sue

The looters aren't just stealing from stores, they are stealing from other people, too. This fact pretty much negates Martin's bit about everyone pulling together and being too busy saving people to rob them.

-Blast

Haiti's a disaster on its best day. The photos coming out of there are going to get much, much worse.

Now they've shut down Haiti airspace, they don't have room for any more airplanes and not enough fuel for the ones that are already there.

And the western world's still-reeling economies are going to pinch assistance efforts.


http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2010/01/14/world/worldwatch/entry6097747.shtml

January 14, 2010 3:57 PM

Looting on Rise amid Haiti's Growing Desperation

A desperate citizenry combined with an absence of police forces has led to increased looting in Port-au-Prince in the wake of a massive earthquake that is estimated to have killed tens of thousands.

Video footage from the city showed bands of Haitian youths armed with machetes wandering the streets looting, as the local police were largely invisible.

U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said there have been reports of minor looting. Crowley said the U.S. military is headed to Haiti to "stabilize" the country



Who's running Haiti? No one, say the people

14 Jan 2010 21:14:09 GMT

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 14 (Reuters) - Desperate Haitians turned rubble-strewn streets and parks into makeshift hospitals and refugee camps on Thursday in the absence of any noticeable response from authorities

A major international aid effort has not yet kicked in, although plenty of small groups, many from the United States, have scrambled quickly, moving personnel into Haiti by plane and overland from neighboring Dominican Republic

The two behaviors are not mutually exclusive. It is likely that most people are helping when they can but taking what they feel they must. I doubt anyone is standing on legalisms. A weak infrastructure and extreme poverty are so widespread in the best of times that there were few reserves of anything to start with. The terms 'clothes on their back' and 'a pot to [censored] in' come to mind.

There will always be a few that take advantage of the situation, phishing sites for fake charities showed up online within hours of the earthquake hitting the news, but most people seem to be cooperating and helping as much as they can.



Yea ... that's got to be a kings ransom. Take the poorest people in the poorest nation in the norther hemisphere. Wreck their homes and infrastructure to make them refugees. Take everything they have left and dump it in your yard ... and a day later you would pay someone $100 just to haul it all off.

Interesting data on the earthquake itself and comparison to other historical quakes.

That earthquake fault is visible from the surface.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2010/01/14/GR2010011400151.html

Well this is not exactly the case. There are many international/military airfields within 500 miles such Cuba (Havana, Guantanamo), Miami, Bahama's, Turks and Caicos islands, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico.

Getting aircraft in and out in a shuttle system should be easily setup to get international NGOs/Aid into Port-au-Prince.

I have just watched the 10pm BBC news and there are British SAR teams sitting at the airport in the Dominican Republic - they have been there for the last 24 hours.

This situation appears to have started after the US FAA closed the airspace over Haiti at the request of the Haitian Government, even though the Haitian Government is non existent and the US military have 'secured' the airfield.

It seems you think what the theives did was no big deal.
-Blast

According to the Washington Post:

"Federal Aviation Administration halted all civilian flights from the United states to Haiti at the request of the Haitian government because the airport tarmac was clogged with planes unloading relief supplies. The airport also lacks sufficient fuel stocks to refuel departing flights, officials said.

Nine U.S. planes were already in the air when the FAA issued the order, an official said."

Always be sure to take news reports like that with several grains of salt.

Remember those rapes and assaults in the Superdome after Katrina that were reported over and over by a media eager for sensationalism? None of them happened. Those reports were supposedly made from within the Superdome... a place that had no cell coverage or landline service for at least a week.

News media have long since given up providing anything like accurate news. They sell sensationalism to sell advertising, period.

In his book about what happened during and after Katrina, Lt. General Russel L. Honoré (US Army) said that the sensationalism (read 'outright lying') of the media prevented people from going into the area to help. They needed a lot of buses to evacuate the people from the Superdome, but the drivers wouldn't come within 30 miles or so of the place, just parking the buses and walking away.

I'm not saying there is no looting, but some photos of young men carrying machetes could have a few other explanations, too. Who knows, in Haiti, they could BE the police force....

Sue

High-res pics

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnew...ntry-apart.html

What an interesting set of statement, re the military.

I imagine that the 82nd's medical contingent knows a few things about trauma surgery and triage. Ditto the Navy docs and corpsmen who are going to be with the Marines. Not to mention one of the hospital ships are enroute, which is more beds than most western cities of less than a million people have, mostly devoted to trauma.

Same kind of statements stand for the combat/civil engineers that are with them. And the couple dozen helos and landing craft that are going down are going to be able to get stuff from the ships to the shore now that the port out of commition- the cranes are in the water, they'll have to be pulled out. Wait, that sounds like a gig for Navy and Coast Guard salvage divers and SEALS working with heavy lift helos and drag lines to heavy vessels! Then everything that isn't an amphib transport can offload.

They are sending Airborne because everything they own can be dropped or put down on expedient air strips. Marines can bring their gear in on any beach that doesn't look like Dover. And they can both be enroute in under 48 hours.

Martin, I think we are seeing relatively little of the "Mad Max effect" for a couple of reasons. One of those is it is too soon, most people are worried about finding their families, but there are already reports of looting from most media outlets.

That, and this is Haiti. We notice some looting in a stable and rich country much more than we do in a poor country. And it is a poor. I'd love to take some of my clients there, with their "oh, please give me a hand out" ways, and show them what the real thing looks like. Our worst urban blight is nothing compared to some of you find in a truely poor country; I don't think most of us in the West (which doesn't include Haiti, despite geography) don't have the needed context to understand just how bad it was.

Or is now.

If anything, this is going to be a phoenix opportunity. Lets see who comes to the top. If anyone does.

At least they haven't sent more UN "Peacekeeping" troops. It seems Haitian children have already suffered enough.

-Blast

Don't forget that our very own History Channel during their "Armageddon Week" encouraged this very thing for "your survival" in "Armageddon". I believe that the sad state of infrastructure and law before the earthquake has pretty much made this their "Armageddon" .

Right - there are few assets available that can go anywhere in the world in unstable situations and be self-sufficient long enough for re-supply. There's no shortage of volunteers to go, but few who can be on the ground and fully operational inside 48 hours at little risk until re-supply.

The Navy has two big hospital ships that would be great here but I don't know ho many weeks lead time they need.

The cause of the FAA directive is probably not so much fuel as it is getting supplies off the airfield in Haiti. The Haitian government is not very well organized at the best of times and getting supplies distributed is probably the bottleneck, not getting them to Haiti.

Given the history and state of things the capabilities of an Amphibious Assault Group would be handy for putting large amounts of supplies ashore at many sites. I don't know where those assets are kept or how long it would take to deploy them this way, but it's probably the group most able to move thousands of tons of supplies to many minimally-prepared sites.

I heard this morning that the runway at the airport is intact, although the tower and main terminal building are damaged. The US Coast Guard has checked out the main port and that's apparently a mess.

But I guess you could just zoom onto the beach with your supplies riding on LCAC's (hovercrafts). Quite an expensive ferry service there.

Actually, getting stuff to Haiti is only half the logistical problem. How to unload planes/ships without enough manpower or equipment? Where to securely store supplies once they're off the planes/ships? How to distribute them throughout the city securely? Even the UN doesn't have enough trucks for its own purposes. Which roads are passable? Heck, no one even really knows where supplies should go because crowds have gathered both at traditional places, like schools, sports facilities, etc. but also at impromptu sites throughout the region.

I think Arney has touched on the central and hardest problem to be solved. How to get the help and supplies distributed throughout the city, and how to get it into the hands of the people who need it and not the profiteers.

In addition, soon, if not already, the decomposing dead and lack to sanitary facilities are going to render whole areas uninhabitable. Removal and burial and setting up sanitary facilities are as urgent as getting food and water to the survivors.

IMO the amount of effort needed to organize and run the distribution of aid, and removal of the dead is far far greater than anyone has even begun to think about: and these are things that need to be done now.

I hope I'm wrong, but I think the worst is yet to come.

Dagny's correct, FAA halts air traffic to Haiti, no room for planes.

Birds-eye view of the damage, via satellite. You can zoom in:


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/spe...ml?hpid=topnews


Satellite image of Port-au-Prince earthquake damage

Explore this GeoEye satellite image, taken Wednesday at 10:27 a.m., a day after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti's captial and surrounding area.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal...ml?hpid=topnews

FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION:

The Federal Aviation Administration has canceled a ground stop on civilian flights from the U.S. to Haiti after prohibiting such flights for most of Thursday.

Haitian authorities are slowly accepting inbound flights, but long delays are possible, according to FAA advisories.

Authorities prohibited flights from entering Haitian airspace earlier Thursday as the Port-au-Prince tarmac was clogged with several planes trying to unload relief supplies.

Congestion will remain a problem in the coming days, FAA said.

At least 30 aircraft were parked around the Port-au-Prince airport runway for most of Thursday, with some planes on the ramps around the runway and others on grassy areas.

The Port-au-Prince airport also lacks sufficient fuel to refuel departing flights.

Track FAA’s advisories on Haitian airspace here.

FAA dispatched at least two inspectors on Wednesday to help assess the condition of airport runways in Port-au-Prince and Cape Haitien. Both airports are open only to private and humanitarian flights, it said. The inspectors will check runway surfaces and lighting, with an eye toward ensuring the airports can support round-the-clock civil relief operations.

The first planes from Canada were arriving today. The Minister of Defence mentioned that water treatment and medics were part of the first shipments.
At least they are not facing cold weather on top of the rest of their problems.

I can't help wondering if the attention this disaster brings might spur changes in their government.
Their government has been very bad for a very long time.

God bless America.


Updated 7:53 p.m. ET Thursday

DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES:

The federal government will deploy thousands of medical professional in the coming days to assist Haitians recovering from the earthquake. More than 250 government doctors, medical professionals are en route, HHS said Thursday night. More than 12,000 personnel could possibly assist in the coming days.

Department officials activated the National Disaster Medical System, which provides assistance to state, local and federal authorities following major disasters, especially in caring for casualties evacuated back to the U.S.

Teams of doctors, nurses, paramedics, emergency medical technicians and surgical physicians with the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps will travel to Haiti, along with other medical personnel from Georgia, California, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Florida, HHS said. The teams will bring along 22,000 pounds of medical equipment and supplies.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will also assist by checking the country's water and food supply.

And God bless Canada, and all the peoples of the world who are helping.

Well said. In March 2006, Popular Mechanics came out with a piece about Katrina myths titled "Debunking the Myths of Hurricane Katrina: Special Report" (http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/2315076.html). It makes for some interesting reading, and offers a cautionary tale about the accuracy or 'current' media reporting. It may be wise to reserve judgment for now, until the quality of the information being provided has been ascertained.

I think my thinking mirrors Martin's in general when it comes to disasters, but I was watching CNN tonight, before I turn in, and I saw some scenes of a vast tent city and seeing that scene made me nervous. I think we've been a bit unintentionally misled by the TV coverage because most shots are limited to these narrow streets and you only see a limited number of people at one time, or else you see these aerial shots of collapsed buildings and few people. But in reality, this is a vast, teeming, densely populated city, and scenes like that park better illustrate how many people are crammed together in this city.

The earthquake was Tuesday and here it is, almost going to be Friday as I write this. I imagine that many or even most people have had little to nothing to eat or even drink since the earthquake, or else the lucky ones have the money to pay an arm and leg on the black market but that money won't last. Just thinking about that tent city--if a water truck pulls up now into the middle of that sea of humanity, with only enough water for a fraction of the people there, how is that scene going to play out? I really hope that people can remain calm and orderly, but now that the shock and confusion of the earthquake must be wearing off by now, I fear that desperation could turn things ugly.

As in many other developing countries, there were food riots last year in Port-Au-Prince when world food prices were going through the roof. UN peacekeepers and Haitian National Police had to battle protesters for a week, protecting the Presidential Palace. Riots, looting, and arsons were common. Things were so bad, the Senators voted to oust the prime minister. So Haiti is certainly no stranger to mass violence.

I really think it's a race between showing the people that food, water, medical care, taking care of the dead is here or at least imminent, and the boiling over of frustrated and desperate Haitians. The planes are stacking up at the airport, but as far as I know, nothing is really going out to the people yet, and that must frustrate a lot of Haitians. (But really, how many people can you feed with the contents of one plane? Compared to millions of city residents--not many. They need to get that port up and running again.)

I think that comment is highly inappropriate.

FIY, there are around 9000 people from UN in a peace keeping operation at Haiti. According to media reports, they have suffered some losses including the collapse of the head quarter. However, the main body of operations seems to be intact and I am sure that is a priceless asset in the situation that unfolds now.

Not to cast blame but one has to wonder what international aid groups, religious organizations, NGO's, governments, and the like have been doing in Haiti all these years? The life expectancy is around 55 years and from 1950 to 2009 there has been a population explosion from over one million to over nine million today. Obviously whatever foreign intervention that has taken place so far has been misguided, unrealistic, damaging, or just plain isn't working.

All I can say is there are a LOT of busy DMAT and DMORT teams right now.

Let's say a prayer for the people of Haiti, and for the folks down there helping as well

As for water - sometime yesterday (from last I read) The Carl Vinson should have shown up - Now the issue is distributing water, as she can make close to 1/2 million gallons of clean water/day by herself (and the rest of the ships in the group can also make significant fresh water)

I was reading about the whole issue of "there is no way to unload the planes" - sigh, unfortunately what was the Military Air Lift Command is kinda busy these days flying supplies over to Central Asia. One good thing they know how to do is unload airplanes where there is little/no gear - for using airplanes where stuff can just be rolled/driven off, to knowing that on the first of those planes, you ship in the machines to help unload, in the place where they are the first off the plane

Let's hope they can keep up. LED mentioned a population of over 9 million, so at 500,000 gallons per day, that's a quart a day for 2,000,000 people. What about the other 7,000,000? Like Arney said, things could turn ugly. Those humanitarian troops may be forced into security duty after all.

That was a very interesting article, Gryps.

Thanks for the link.

Before you come down too hard on Blast, Be aware there have been numerous allegations of child abuse/sexual exploitation at the hands of the UN Peacekeeping Forces in Haiti:

BBC Report of Human Rights Abuses / Sexual Explitation by UN Peacekeeping Troops

Pete

Not just Haiti. . .

I haven't watched any TV this morning yet, but I was just reading that a TIME magazine photographer has seen two roadblocks Haitians set up downtown using the corpses of their fellow Haitians to protest the slowness of the relief operations. Yikes, that's a bad sign!

That's a horrifying sight to imagine, but there's a gruesome logic to it, I guess. The shock value of using bodies sends a signal to the government and anyone watching in the rest of the world on TV. And the roadblock is probably a way to try and get any relief trucks to stop at their street instead of passing through. Well, and there's always the possibility of robbing passing vehicles or demanding some sort of "toll", I guess.

If these roadblocks are part of a wider trend, that's going to make transportation even harder. Not only do you have earthquake-related debris blocking roads, but soon the Haitians themselves will be purposely blocking roads for selfish, but understandable reasons, too.

This is an interesting and mature discussion of the reality of responding to a large natural disaster, I hope we can keep it up. Haiti had a mostly inadequate infrastructure before the EQ, afterwards its ocean ports have been knocked down and the remaining airstrips are inadequate to provide airlift capacity to support the nearby population. Ocean ports are generally built on areas that may be subject to liquefaction, so restoring normal crane lift capacity to/from ships will take a while, probably too long to help. Meantime the military can provide other options for marine delivery including roll on roll off carriers. The major air field was undamaged but it lacks room for a large number of aircraft to be on the ground and unload concurrently - and inventory unloaded has nowhere to be stored, short of immediately leaving the air field. Lack of fuel may be a temporary issue, as controllers can require that visiting aircraft arrive with sufficient fuel to depart for a nearby field with adequate fuel. Finally roads into the most damaged sections of Port au Prince are clogged with debris and must be cleared to deliver food, water and medicine - or victims must be brought out of damaged areas into more accessible ones where food, shelter, and medical care can be delivered in a more controlled manner.

These are all logistics issues, and I am positive that within an hour of the EQ responders outside Haiti were focussed on them, and making plans. I was working at the local Seattle Red Cross, and we were quickly scanning maps to determine where the best mass casualty and mass shelter sites could be located - away from the epicenter. We are not involved in the Haiti response, but that's what goes on at many levels. Some of the first responders in to Haiti had to include scouting parties to do on ground damage assessment and assess routes to these pre-identified locations. The US Coast Guard also did aerial surveys of damage, they are posted on the USCG website - http://cgvi.uscg.mil/media/main.php?g2_itemId=744801. The Red Cross and other responder agencies do pretty much the same as they move into a disaster area.

I am a little more confident that aid can be delivered without massive riots, but the extreme poverty that Haiti experiences every day is a wild card in the equation.

In an effort to keep up the interesting and mature discussion, would temporary ports like those used by Allied forces at Normandy on D-Day be viable? I know those were built way ahead of time but surely there is something similar that could be used now. Maybe a ferry system from boats to beaches? The logistics of such a thing are beyond me but there has to be a workable solution. If there is, surely it is already in the works as we speak. For the sake of the unfortunate victims in Haiti, I hope so.

In the spirit in which Martin originally started this thread, let me contribute an article by a sociologist who has studied this topic that also echoes that sentiment.

Nightmare in New Orleans: Do disasters destroy social cooperation?

Here's the main gist of the article:


Of course, there are exceptions, and we'll just have to wait and see how Haiti goes in the next days and weeks.

The sociologist does distinguish between the consequences of "pure" looting and looting associated with rioting. When anger boils over and a mob mentality takes over, I guess all the rules and instincts for social cooperation can go out the window even by otherwise upstanding folks. The angrier and more desperate the situation, the greater the risk of that breaking point being reached. If you can at least minimally meet the needs of the people, or at least give them hope, then a cooperative spirit tends to win out over the violent kind.

That's good to know. To Mark's question, I have to say I don't know, but engineers should be doing the kind of assessment that NihtHiker did, and propose a recovery infrastructure plan. NightHiker might agree, it depends on the terrain that's left after the shake - if the dock area is more or less intact but the cranes destroyed, they might do some temporary fixes to the docks and bring in 'portable' lift equipment for immediate use. Either way, from some port photos I saw on the Boston Globe site, I don't think there is any quick fix there.

This is mostly common sense, but here's visual evidence that Haitians are gathering in the open spaces, places that probably should be transitioned to mass shelter areas run by agencies that can provide food, medical, and emotional support. Some are too small, but at least a few of these open spaces (stadiums) I know we pre-identified by looking at Visual Earth sat maps just after the EQ happened. http://www.digitalglobe.com/downloads/DG_Analysis_Haiti_Earthquake_13Jan2010.pdf

Getting aid to a population that already is sitting in the safest place possible is different than getting aid to people who remain in debris-filled streets. You need a path to the site; you need to begin with announcements to those on the site of the plan for a shelter, negotiate for space with those already on the ground if necessary, and begin to offer services, water, food, medical care, transitioning people over the a shelter space. The shelter space should generally be behind a perimeter that can be protected, and services continued there. ICRC and the UN has relevant experience in doing this in mass disaster scenarios. Like Arney points out, the nature of people doesn't change immediately after a disaster, social bonds strengthen, and the prospect of an active shelter and recovery area with an offer of assistance is generally enough to get people involved in setting it up and receiving services. You do need to be careful about a stampede, because each shelter space can only accomodate so many people, and a population can descend on a fresh site from miles in any direction. The sheer number of affected Haitians is scary. Again, there's a helluva lot of logistics to consider in deliverying aid there.

+1 nighthiker. I know my thoughts on a temporary port would not be an easy fix (and probably not cheap), but I figure a lot of offshore drilling companies use them on a regular basis and if one happened to be close by ... Wishful thinking I suppose. The airport is definitely the most viable option at this point. I wonder if air drops of supplies to any isolated communities would be any benefit?

Well, it's the people in the heart of Port-Au-Prince that is the main concern, not small towns away from the capital. I'm sure planners would love to do something like what happened early in the Afghanistan invasion where a C-130 flies in low and they just drop loose Humanitarian Daily Rations (HDR's) over some open area. But that was a completely different scenario.

Do that over a tent city or any other unsecured area of Port-Au-Prince now and I'm pretty sure that it would turn into a Lord of the Flies free-for-all where the young and strong take it all. This is part of the relief conundrum--the longer relief takes to get to the people, the more desperate the people get, and the fewer viable options available to get that relief out to the masses safely and equitably.

Actually warehousing adjacent to the airfield may be a higher priority. They can already fly in C-17's with the runway they have: with air traffic control working the next problem is likely where to put everything you bring in, and then worry about bring in even more.

Another way to conceive of the Haiti relief operation: the world community is taking on the food, water, shelter and medical relief for upwards of 3 million Haitians on no notice. In addition many nations have launched emergency rescue operations for those still under the rubble, also without notice. In an environment without working infrastructure to any great extent. Mind boggling stuff, and this is just the initial response.

This article from this morning's Seattle Times is a great example of how basic first aid training gets pressed into action in a disaster - http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2010798299_haititeacher15m.html. When a disaster strikes, there are prepared and unprepared - if you're prepared, with any level of training, you will be providing aid and assistance, possibly to an extent you never imagined. I think we should all think through what our response would be in a similar situation. To be honest, part of me wants to cower in a hideyhole at the thought of all those crush injuries and fractures, which I would get to help treat for the first 5 days or so, another part of me says to suck it up and be ready to help out.

What got the media in trouble was passing on official statements from the mayor and police chief. Normally that's a reasonable thing to do, but not with New Orleans officials.


I doubt any other method is even 1/10th the cost. On the other hand, there may be no other way to get supplies ashore right now. But Nighthiker says there isn't any way to move supplies inland so it may be a moot problem.


Those were purpose-built for that operation at that site. I don't believe such things are viable any more from a military standpoint. I think today you land via helicopter an hovercraft, secure a site for an airstrip, then capture a harbor.

"I was just reading that a TIME magazine photographer has seen two roadblocks Haitians set up downtown using the corpses of their fellow Haitians to protest the slowness of the relief operations."

Think about that for a moment... it doesn't make any sense at all!

Someone is bringing you water, meds and food, so you block off the access to slow them down even further, so you go longer without water, meds and food? What?

Typo? Misinterpretation? Outright lies?

Sue

Actually, the point is that NO water, food, medicine is getting to these people. That's likely why they're angry enough to do something like this to protest their situation.

You can hear the story from the horse's mouth in a brief interview at the BBC. This the TIME photographer that I was mentioning.

People need some rumor control and exercise some mental restraint in not assuming what is or what might be going on. Generally, with a shortage of reliable evidence otherwise, applying a slight positive bias is safe. It isn't as if finger wagging, being a moral scold or adopting a 'holier than thou' attitude helps anything.

The thing about people starting a rumor of a tidal wave to get people to drop supplies they can loot is itself a rumor. People working themselves into a lather over the possibility of a tidal wave is entirely possible. The possibility of a tidal wave was included in the initial reports of the earthquake. That this rumor might propagate and some people panic is possible. People picking up property dropped when people have run away is also possible. If you really needed water and someone drops a jug of it and runs so there is little chance you might get it back to them might be something of a windfall. Would your turn away out of respect for abstract property rights?

But A plus B plus C, barring multiple corroborating witnesses who were positioned to see the entire situation, doesn't amount to making the initial rumor accurate. Has anyone done an investigation. Perhaps interviewing multiple people who would know?

Likewise there are stories of people using burning tires to burn bodies. And rumors of people building roadblocks. But then again where would one safely burn bodies with the only fuel available, tires? In the road makes sense. This is possible. Now burning tires are also a historic way to block roads. So it is not entirely improbable that people just seeking to dispose of bodies and to limit the chances of contagion might be confused with people building a 'roadblock'. Did anyone ask what they were doing and why?

It depends on your assumptions about what people do and are likely to do. We saw the same thing during Katrina when white people taking things from stores were recorded as 'taking what they needed to save their family' while dark skinned people were recorded as 'looting'. There was no effort in either case to interview the people and find out what they were doing and their motivation. A critical lack of investigation and information that allows people to project their hopes or fears onto the situation.

If a Time Photographer saw a roadblock made of the dead, he'll have pictures and we should be able to find them. Either he'll have pictures, his film and gear were taken, he was lying, or he can easily be labeled the worst photographer ever.

Edit 1: I looked up the story, and Shaul Schwarz is the Time Magazine photographer who reported seeing the roadblock of bodies. The report was done by phone with a BBC correspondent, so pictures may show up in the next few days unless Time holds it back for an issue of the magazine.

Edit 2: Shaul Schwarz works for Getty and has been subcontracted by Time to cover the Aftermath of the Earthquake. He and Timothy Fadek have a gallery of aftermath photos at Time.com. I must warn you, the photos are graphic. One of the photos and captions leads me to believe the story of an actual roadblock may be taken out of context. I guess we'll see.

Anger is an expected response after some traumas / disasters - ask any EMT/Paramedic. Throw in tropical heat, lack of food, water, assistance, living outdoors, masses of injured children and others, the death of family and friends, the stench of death everywhere, the sense that you and everyone around you are nearing death yourselves, really exceptional circumstances - why not be angry and irrational even at the first ambulance crews arriving to help out. Responders should anticipate anger, and not dismiss it, but look to their safety too. Anger is seldom a permanent response to trauma, not if the aid is consistent and begins to overcome the disaster effects.

Funny you should mention this (even if a few days ago). The USNS Comfort just left Norfolk, I think yesterday. So they need about 3-4 days to gear up. I know several docs from my hospital that went underway with them. I believe that the Mercy is a west-coast ship, so it won't be going anywhere.

My attending, resident and I were talking 2 days ago about them shipping out. He's done quite a bit of disaster relief/management with the Navy. We were debating the pros/cons of the hospital ships, and he pretty much voiced the opinion that one of the LHD's would be an ideal platform - I tend to agree. For those civilians, an LHD is kind of a small air-craft carrier with helicopters and vertical take off planes, but also hovercrafts (LCAC's).

In this situation, the helo's could start ferrying personnel and equipment as the ship entered range (for example, supplies for the first 24 hours), with the LCAC's carrying the majority of supplies as they reached their max. ranges. The helo's on return trips could start ferrying patients, and the hangar deck could be used for a massive triage deck. Convert some of the wardrooms and galleys into medical centers, and you could conceviable operate several clinics in the same ship. I think it's an idea worth looking at, personally. Though I'm sure it'd cost a TON of money to re-configure ships. Plus, they'd likely be done to retiring ships, which likely are being retired for a reason!

Anyway, back to Haiti - I think that no matter what is done, it's going to be a cluster. There's going to need to be a viable infrastructure in place, or else we'll just keep seeing the same stories of death, non-clean up, and non-delivery of supplies. With aid pouring in from all over the world, someone needs to point them where to go. Otherwise, they'll stop at the first place they see a need and no one, and those on the outskirts from airports/ports will still be in this situation months from now.

My two cents.

I was involved in a relief operation with the 82d a while back. We deployed and were mainly patrolling areas to stop looting and to protect the relief supplies. We also had attached engineers to clear rubble, and a lot of guys who did unloading of relief supplies.

What got me was this - When the natives figured that the weapons had no ammo, they got their weapons and stole some of ours... we were quickly issued ammo.

Second thing - I heard more "Where have you been, what took you so long to get here?" than I heard "Thank you for coming to help". About the 100th time I heard this, I answered "I was at home, in my house, drinking a beer, sitting in my air conditioning, looking at the storm track on TV and was so freaking happy I was not stupid enough to live here." Sorta shut that clown right up.

Oh, did I mention this was Hurricane Andrew, and I was in Florida? And the infrastructure there is one hell of a lot better than the almost non-existant infrastructure in Haiti. You can only do the best you can with what you have. People scream and cry about how long things take. One reason I reckon most of the people on this board could easily wait out 72/96 hours without outside help.

I take teams of people into third world locations to help at really remote areas and disaster zones. We were not involved with Haiti this time, but it's just because we're still a very young organization and our resources are very limited.

There is a LOT that goes on out there in 3'rd world disasters that you never hear about in the news. Media reports are incredibly deceptive. It certainly IS true that the Haiti situation looks to be tragic, and heartbreaking for the people affected.

What tends to happen is that the major relief organizations are just not fast enough, flexible enough, or nimble enough to really get on top of these fast-moving diasasters. So when the news reports that "help is on the way" ... you should realize that assistance (i.e. food and supplies) may be being put on boats and airplanes. But that sure doesn't mean that any of it actually reached the victims in the first 48 hours. Typically what does happen is that massive amounts of relief supplies pile up at the docks at the affected country. But nobody can get them to the real disaster zone. So stuff just sits there for a long time. Food gets eaten by rats. A lot of equipment gets knocked off by looters who re-sell it in the black markets. Only a fraction of the aid ever gets to the victims. Too bad!

I'd be prepared to bet that the victims who were buried by that quake got virtually no help (incl. help digging them out) during the first 48 hours. But the first 48 hours is THE time when you need to dig out people and get them emergency food and water. The only immediate help probably came from those neighbors in Haiti who did what they could to help their fellow men and women.

I'm sure there are exceptions to what I am saying here. Military groups from around the world can be very effective in these disaster zones, because the military is self-organized, motivated, and has a get-the-job-done attitude. I've seen some fine examples of work by these units. But they tend to only stay in the disaster region for a limited time. Still - they do a great job.

The big civilian aid organizations typically don't become effective for at least a week, and most don't really get rolling until several weeks have gone by.

Ironically, what ends up happening in the third world is that these major disasters act as a "catalyst" to get some long-term assistance for the people there. Typically the actual victims of the disaster just live or die - they never get help fast enough to save them. But later on many organizations send doctors, nurses, and relief workers who wind up treating people for all kinds of on-going medical conditions (many of which have never seen any treatment). It's not unusual to be treating people who have gone 10-20 years with debilitating conditions ... but they just had no access to medicine or relief work.

other Pete

It might be an idea for the authority in charge of the relief effort to start thinking about evacuating the population centres with Haiti via shipping to other countries, where organsised tent cities can be setup much more easily than attempting to get the limited aid in though a single destroyed port and an airfield with limited capacity (A Berlin airlift scenario is beyond the abilities of the controlling authorities). Haitians are already voting with their feet and are attempting to bug out of the capital. One less mouth to feed on the island is one more mouth to feed for those that are left behind with the limited aid capacity than can be brought in. Shipping out 1 Haitian is a lot easier to do than shipping in 3-6 months of aid for 1 Haitian.

When they conclude this after massive outbreaks of disease begin to occur, which will occur after the security breakdown and civil unrest, (the local UN forces will not have the stomach to start shooting the locals) because of the failure to get in aid quickly enough, then it will be too late even to implement this measure.

I suspect that the overall death toll with Haiti may be many more times that of the initial 100,000-200,000 deaths due to the initial Earthquake. Time is quickly running out.

Some observations from Israelis who've arrived on the scene:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1263147904646&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull


Jan 15, 2010 20:10 | Updated Jan 16, 2010 23:30

'Shabbat from hell' reported by Israeli teams in Haiti

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH

The large field hospital established by the Israel Defense Forces' Medical Corps at 10 a.m. Saturday local time was already treating dozens of patients four hours later....

Brig.-Gen. Shalom Ben-Arye, who heads the Israeli delegation, said Saturday afternoon that it was still possible to find survivors among the ruins of the capital. He was quoted by Israel Radio as saying that three search-and-rescue teams would leave at first light to search for survivors in several spots around the city, among them the collapsed UN headquarters.

The 121-member team includes 40 doctors including a psychiatrist, 20 nurses, 20 paramedics and medics, 20 lab and x-ray technicians and administrators.

...In a disturbing e-mail that Goldstein managed to send to ZAKA headquarters in Jerusalem, he writes of the "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."

I saw that one in real time on CNN with Anderson Cooper near that refugee's field. It's happened behind his back as he spoke with some local news guy.

You want to evacuate several million people to third party nations.

In a country where the communictions infrastructure is patchy at the best of times, the fuel delivery system isn't any better, and there is neither functioning sea port facilities nor a central government in anything but name. That assumes that every one complies without the use of armed sweeps, and that won't happen.

Please, think about what you are saying. If you strip off the euphemisms, it is a forced relocation into internment camps. It will involved hundreds of thousands of those troops you so very happily despised a few days ago, marching people onto aircraft or landing craft at bayonet point. Were will you evacuate them to? No area will want them. Those internments camps will turn into concentration camps, with wire and guards between the residents of the areas you inflict these camps on and those who were marched into them.

Best to keep them there, in their country, at their homes. That way, they can get supplies and choose to rebuild or not on their own, providing the majority of the labor.

"It might be an idea for the authority in charge of the relief effort to start thinking about evacuating the population centres with Haiti via shipping to other countries"
--------------------------

Good idea .. but it's usually a complete free-for-all. There is no competent person in charge. This is the third world we're talking about. Leaders are corrupt and mostly on-the-take.

That's a big part of why the disaster zone is such a disaster in the first place. Chaos and confusion reign supreme. Each relief organization basically does their own thing - esp. in the beginning part of the effort. Later on, the large relief org's normally will start to develop informal coordination meetings. But these only happen in the main center - typically the capital city. So anybody working further out in the field is still experiencing the "free for all" mode of operation. That's life during third world disaster operations. It can be enormously frustrating and stressful - but there's no way to change it. It is ... what it is.

On the positive side - amazingly enough some good work gets done anyway. And best of all, a LOT of volunteers actually find ways to cooperate and work together for the common good. There will be volunteers from all over the world who show up and try to help. So a lot of good stuff still happens. Confused - yes. Chaotic - yes. But a positive contribution anyway.

other Pete

You won't find any country willing to take such a large number of refugees. It's unfortunate, but history shows it's a very bad idea.

It's also a lot of people to move with no pre-existing infrastructure.

I wonder how many water wells and natural water reserves were damaged by the earthquake. Can aquifers be dramatically affected by earthquakes? My question is, what happens if there's not enough fresh water in Haiti?

Temporarily ... I'm sure they probably do have a water problem. It would help them a lot if some organization would go down there and dig some fresh wells.

The third world is very harsh. Remember that in Haiti you can find people eating dirt. Literally. They make small pies from mud, dry them in the sun, and sell them as food. It makes no sense nutritionally - people are just desperately hungry and will eat anything. I've seen similar things in the ghetto's in Africa. People will sell rocks (actually small stones) as food in the ghetto markets. The stones are also eaten by people who are desperately hungry - esp. pregnant women. I suppose the rocks act as a "space filler" in their stomachs.

other Pete

Teslinhiker - please see my comments on the other thread in the Survival forum. The title of the thread is something like "PSK for rescue operations". Especially, see my comments at the end of the thread about sources of clean drinking water. You need to give some serious thought to what I said there.
---------------------------------------------

On a separate subject - THREE CHEERS to the country of Israel and the group of Israeli's who responded to the Haiti disaster very quickly. It sounds very much like the Israeli's were one of the first effective response teams on the scene. No doubt the conditions they encountered were extremely ugly. That was an outstanding job by them!!! I hope someone from that group will come and post some firsthand observations on this forum.

other Pete

I am about to sound real negative here.

Haiti was at best a third world nation. It lacked proper sanitation and clean water; couldn't feed itself, police itself, maintain roads, or provide adequate medical care; the standing government was a joke and totally corrupt. I DO NOT blame the people of Haiti for this, I blame the government.

After the earthquake's devastation other governments are now going in to attempt to rebuild. Or more precisely build, as the things the relief efforts are trying to establish were pretty much lacking in the beginning.

Sending the Hatian people somewhere else won't help much. Imagine you have nothing, then are sent away from familiar surrounding, separated from what family you do have left, and end up in a country where you don't know the customs or language.

Most relief efforts try and bring the country affected to a status quo ante, where they were before. In this case, doing that is absurd. Why expend energy, time and money to build a turdhole? This relief effort is going to take a long long time, and cost even more money. I can only hope the final effect is something better than what was there originally.

Maybe a bit more optimistic note: Haiti is an extremely poor country. The extent of the devasation in Port au Prince is so severe, that there is the opportunity to rebuild areas to a new standard, including sanitation, water and water treatment. Building to code requires establishing a building code - building codes for extremely poor countries either don't exist, or exist but are easily built around, resulting in new devastation in the next hurricane (frequent), or earthquake (more rare, but uppermost on their minds). That's a difficult policy decision. But when they build, they can do better for themselves, and a big part of development aid should be providing training to Haitians in building to code, whatever they settle on. And historically, you can't ignore the corruption that funnels off funds for private benefit instead of putting them into public works projects.

This effort at rebuilding and improving the lot of the people of Haiti already goes on - alot of private charities and NGOs already build for long term survival and improving the lot of Haitian communities. See this one by a local church, going on as we speak 160 miles north of the area of devastation - http://upcconvergence.wordpress.com/. Its an effort constructed one foundation and one project at a time. Progress is slow, but it is noticeable. To reconstruct Port au Prince with anything other than a repeat of favelas and poverty exposing its citizens to the next disaster, it will require a plan that attempts something more than what they had, and a whole lotta effort to stick to it.

This is a haunting quote. Don't know if it's a fair observation, but it certainly is memorable:

"People are scared of the poor."


http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/01/16/haiti.abandoned.patients/index.html


Security concerns cause doctors to leave hospital, quake victims

January 16, 2010 6:33 p.m. EST

Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) -- Earthquake victims, writhing in pain and grasping at life, watched doctors and nurses walk away from a field hospital Friday night after a Belgian medical team evacuated the area, saying it was concerned about security.

The decision left CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta as the only doctor at the hospital to get the patients through the night.

...Retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who led relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said the evacuation of the clinic's medical staff was unforgivable.

"Search and rescue must trump security," Honoré said. "I've never seen anything like this before in my life. They need to man up and get back in there."

But it sure beats dying from a simple infection, a communicable disease such as Typhus, Cholera or dysentery, slow starvation or dehydration or even shot to death by the folks who have come to Haiti on a humanitarian mission or sliced open by a machette because your neighbour wants to eat your children especially if you've survived after your concrete house fell down around you and your family.

Haiti has no building code. I assume this means no inspectors, no habitability standards, etc.

Western-style codes add a lot of cost to a project and I wonder how much can be done _cheaply_ for earthquakes in Haiti. Note that even those with the money to build correctly didn't do so. Also, this earthquake is getting all of the attention now but over time hurricanes cause larger loss, and this is prime hurricane territory.

(it might be better to start with codes aimed at hurricanes since some effectiveness can be had cheaply, and then work up to more significant standards as the Haitians can afford it)

Any effort to add building codes will run into the inspection problem. An inspection system has to be created from scratch, kept honest, and kept alive once honest...

I was watching that live Friday night and it was a tough situation to watch unfold. I tip my hat to Sanjay Gupta for staying and keeping all the patients alive till morning, but it was a tough situation for the Belgians, too. Sanjay has his own security detail, and the Belgian team chief was told that their UN security was being pulled back for the night. Despite pleas from the team chief, the UN was not willing to provide any security overnight but did offer them the option to return with the peacekeepers, and that's what he finally decided to do.

That same night, I heard that some of the SAR teams were also suspending operations overnight because of security concerns. I remember one Russian SAR team being mentioned specifically. So this medical team was not the only group to be concerned with their safety. And I imagine that these folks are not novices about operating in conditions somewhat like this, so I think it's overly simplistic for anyone to broadly say that they are just "scared of poor people" or "scared of black people" or some generalization like that.

I kind of agree with Gen. Honore's sentiment, but at the same time, I'm not there on the ground with these people and don't know what they're going through. If these medical staffers were harmed, that would have had a chilling effect, I would imagine, throughout the entire relief operation by all parties. One could reasonably argue that "Better safe than sorry" is better than a devil may care attitude. Let's not forget that the relief operations is motived by goodwill from the international community. Sour that goodwill and international enthusiasm and resolve could dry up in an instant.

I haven't heard of any reports of anything similar happening Saturday night.

Saturday was the first day I saw TV images of trucks going out with relief supplies and distributing them to the people. I was also a bit surprised to see Blackhawks dumping supplies in various locations. I'm not aware of any deaths, but as you'd expect, it was the strongest and fastest to the supplies who got anything from these air drops. In a couple cases, you saw cardboard cases of HDR's being dropped out the side doors as the chopper hovered over some clearing. In another case, it landed away from an encampment and the crew chiefs were throwing cases of bottled water out onto the ground as fast they could. In the distance, you could see throngs of Haitians running towards them.

Definitely, not the best way to do it. But when you're talking about life and death, at some point, something--anything--is better than not doing anything at all, I guess. I assume that the roads are still largely impassable and that there is a huge shortage of trucks and fuel. Also, it's kind of ridiculous how much security you need to organize the distribution from just one truck. You could see this long cordon of soldiers necessary to funnel the people single file and keep them from rushing the truck all at once, and in that particular occasion, it seemed to work well and even women and children were getting supplies. If that's what it takes for every truckload, though, seems like you'd run out of soldiers really quickly.

Dumping supplies out the door of a helo isn't optimal, but what you don't see is once the young and the strong get the supplies, what do they do with them - I wager a fair amount get brought back and shared with a waiting family, parent, children or someone else who isn't as young or strong. Not every bit of food put out the door goes on some mythical black market. It may sound kind of Malthusian, but if you can't securely feed this many people at once, you may need to drop some supplies in today, get most of them fed, and try to deal with the unrest among (better) fed people. Could this mean that someone who needed food or water to survive didn't get any today? Possibly, and among a population of 3 million its pretty likely. People will continue to die until the response can effectively bring in enough to feed everyone, tha't a fact.

It's impossible to judge the Belgian medicos who bugged out, we can't assess the situation they found themselves in. You can't be scared of the people you are trying to help, at the same time your security force can't make a decision to leave for the night unless its a very serious situation. I don't know the rate of drug abusers in a place like Haiti, but its probably at least as high as in the US, just with cheaper narcotics and cruder alternatives. Drug abusers come out of disasters too, and they still need their fixes, and conceivably a medical aid unit with pain killers might become a target for that, 5 days out from the main disaster. I don't know though...

From what I hear on local news - local stations embedded guys with the 82d -- the crew chiefs dump the stuff out away from the people because if they land and try to unload the chopper gets mobbed by people wanting to get away from where they are. By mobbed, I mean like 50+ people in the back of a BlackHawk, not a real safe situation. So the chopper crews spot an encampment, dump the stuff out a ways as fast as they can, then beat feet.

Once they get vehicles in they will start to truck it in to the camps and attempt an orderly unload.

Something beats nothing anyhow.

I sympathize with the medical team that decided to pull out. I can't imagine a more difficult decision, but it was probably the correct one.

Haiti has a long history of kidnapping, where foreigners are taken by violence and held for ransom by gangs/thugs. I don't think the 'quake would change the facts on the ground.

One opportunistic act by a few criminals could substantially delay or derail the arrival of help for a great many innocents.

Dropping supplies and backing off may not be perfect, but it beats most of the alternatives. Handing individuals water and food takes an incredible amount of time and is totally unrealistic. I know we like to think here in our 'civilized' countries that places like Haiti are filled with nothing but profiteers, but I don't think that is the case. Honore' said much of the looting in NOLA was for things like mattresses to keep Grandma off the ground.

Regarding security: the 'peacekeeping forces' only work during daylight hours??? They couldn't establish a security perimeter around the medical facility? Whose ego was getting in the way THIS time?

As to rebuilding, forget the First World building codes! There are cheap ways to build decent homes that don't involve nitpicking, common-senseless bureaucrats. And the first person to mention flush toilets should be shot, hung and crucified (in any order).

But I'm sure that the rebuilding will involve the most cost, the least sense, the most expensive materials and methods, and the most First World contractors stuffing their pockets.

Sue, who is reaching beyond cynical

Not to mention Sanjay probably has the best health and life insurance money can buy. Easy to take risks when you're a celebrity working for a television network with unlimited resources to take care of you. Sounds more like he put his crew in danger with his showboating than a selfless act of generosity. Production assistants don't make squat compared to talent. But who knows.

I think you're 100% right. Parasites will be coming out of the woodwork for reconstruction contracts. IIRC, at least 50% or more of the money spent on contractors in war and disaster reconstruction zones is lost due to theft, incompetence, waste, etc.

Here's a BBC link giving early first-person reports from some NGO personnel. I thought it was an interesting read.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8458915.stm

Beg to differ.
Send them.
Get a declaration of Martial Law off the Haitian Government & the Airborne can deal with them.

Alright Susan, I'll bite - why shouldn't we consider a modern sewer system and (gasp) flush toilets (or tropical equivalent) for people in Haiti, besides surviving your obvious acrimony and cynicism? Howabout running water? Or electricity? As to building codes, granted they are expensive, but what do bureaucrats have to do with them - do you object to bureaucrats enforcing a building code, or to the distinct possibility that bureaucrats might profit from not enforcing a code? What option do you offer - would you accept that people build their own homes again, and suffer the same devastation after the next hurricane, again? Should Haitians just go back to tossing garbage in the streets and gulleys, and wait for it to wash away?

Basic sanitation is a fundamental precept of modern civilization - it helps prevent disease, and relative to its cost is a no brainer. With the extent of devastation there are no expensive retrofits, its planning and laying pipe. From descriptions it sounds like much of Port au Prince's most impoverished areas are served by open sewers in the streets. the Romans managed this - moving Haiti from the 18th century should be part of whatever plan people develop.

Good lord doug. Haiti is turning out to be a worst case scenario, indeed. I was enjoying my morning coffee but now I am sick to my stomach. I want so desparately to help those poor victims in some way. but anything I think of seems too little too late. They need help NOW. Medical supplies, water, shelter, food. I know about most of the donation lines available. is there anything else short of quiting my job and flying over that I can do to help?

EDIT: P.S. I noticed a comment elsewhere about the medical staff pulling out due to security reasons at night. I also noticed one in the article about the Israeli medical staff bugging out so to speak for the same reasons. This makes me wonder what is going on at night that armed soldiers cannot provide security? Armed looters? Gangs? Or worse? Anything to do with the groups of Haitians armed with machetes I've seen in the news? Anyone have any idea why they can't provide security at night and what they need security from?

That's easy Lono, read her thread on dealing with human waste and pay particular attention to her comments later in the thread about composting.

http://forums.equipped.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=193208&page=1

Flying in the politicians for photo opportunities doesn't help either. Now it might be the case that Mr and Mrs Clinton don't get on but they could have at least got the same flight into airfield at Port-au-Prince if the photo op was that important, especially with a Médecins Sans Frontières flight had to be denied a landing slot to make way for the VIPs (these flights didn't return empty back to the US though - so I suppose that is a few hundred less mouths to feed and water in Haiti)

If you take a look at the latest news - you can see some of the factors I mentioned playing out. Lack of coordination of relief efforts.

Let's take a look:

1. The Belgian team had to pull out because of security concerns - they are afraid for the safety of their doctors and nurses. I can't fault them, although the decision is tragic. But they must keep their people safe. It can be very hard to deal with security concerns in the third world.

2. U.S. Special forces arrive and start doing some good work, but not without organizational challenges.

Now let's imagine a different variation to this scenario. Let's suppose the US forces had been assigned the mission of establishing a "Green Zone" in Port au Prince, where they create a safe compound ringed by barbed wire and sentries. Inside the wire, they establish a temp hospital and a station for preparing large supplies of fresh water and relief supplies. That's an excellent objective for special forces, and it would have allowed the Belgians to withdraw to the safety of a camp with a secure perimeter. This would have allowed all personnel to be most effective at what they were trained to do - the doc's and nurses could treat injured people and the soldiers could guard the encampment. However, what we've got right now is a free-for-all with no overall coordination.

I'd like to hope that someone will figure this stuff out sooner or later, and get things more coordinated. But it takes time ... and sometimes doesn't happen at all.

Dropping supplies off helo's is not a great solution because the looters and bandits wind up taking control of a lot of the stuff.

And here's a comment from the IDF team on the ground, taken from an article published at www.debka.com ...

---------------------------------
IDF field hospital at full stretch in Haiti

The only facility in Haiti with a fully-functioning operating theater, the large Israeli field hospital treated many hundreds of patients in its first four days and helped at least one woman give birth. Another jumbo jet loaded with supplies and equipment is due to set out to replenish the facility's dwindling stocks. Medical aid and other basic necessities are still reaching the millions of distressed Haitians in Port-au-Prince and its outskirts too slowly to save lives.

The estimate of 200,000 dead may never be confirmed as at least 80,000 corpses have so far been dumped into mass graves to ward off epidemics. Two men pulled out of the rubble - one a Danish UN officer and a Haitian by the Israeli rescue team working for eight hours to extricate him - may be among the last to have survived more than five days in their concrete traps.
----------------------------------

other Pete

You don't know that - as I said before, its a race of the swiftest and most fit to gather the supplies from beneath the helo. That may be looters and bandits sure, but it is also fathers and sons, taking the supplies back to families and elderly. I don't pretend that every bit of the supplies gets to the ones who most need it, but you can't say that most of it ends up with looters and bandits either - there's just no evidence for that, even by local accounts.

That's one thread I had skipped, there's only so much time in the day. Well, composting works, except when it fails - failure of composted fecal matter, a badly designed compost pile, will attract rodents, leading to the spread of disease, leading to the kinds of issues that are addressed and mitigated by a working sanitation system. The idea that all 3 million urban dwellers could compost as an alternative to a sanitation system is a big stretch, I would say impossible - that they might all do it without creating a disease risk is downright wrong. And as for the compost material of choice, sawdust - plentiful in the Pacific Northwest, we have lots of it; in deforested Haiti and urban Port au Prince, not so much.

Lono - I hope that you are right and some reasonable amount of these supplies are reaching families in need. The situation on the ground probably varies from one location to another. The few pix I've seen from Haiti, incl. some photo's taken by an LA Times reporter on the ground, appear to show that looting is common right now. But granted - any media coverage is not depicting the clear overall situation.

If you personally know someone in the US Special Forces, you might encourage them to post their personal pix on the Web. My guess is that the military folks who are flying the helo's probably have personal digital cameras, so they may have photo's of what the scene looks like when they drop off their relief supplies. It would be interesting to see what these pictures show. I can't imagine why the Pentagon would restrict these types of photo's - since we are not talking about warfare here.

other Pete

"Well, composting works, except when it fails - failure of composted fecal matter, a badly designed compost pile, will attract rodents, leading to the spread of disease, leading to the kinds of issues that are addressed and mitigated by a working sanitation system."

Yes, by all means, use hard-to-supply drinking water to flush toilets like we do! Out of sight, out of mind! About 1% of the water on this planet is drinkable, so let's use it to wash fecal matter into the ocean.

Hey, let's run a fresh-water pipeline from the U.S. to Haiti! Or maybe just ship lots and lots of bottled water to do it!

Sue

Well, okay - I'm not a sanitation engineer, nor do I have any expertise in Haiti or tropical climate water supplies. But neither do you - if we are equally ignorant of the specifics, can we agree that someone has solved this issue for adjacent nations - the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Jamaica, Bermuda, all Caribbean nations with similar water dynamics? Water is always in short supply on islands, and while Haiti may prove even more difficult than any of these, can we agree that a sanitation system is at least better than the option you have chosen, which is personal composting or the status quo? There are answers to a local water supply too - collecting rain water via rooftop catchements and storing it in cisterns, very popular I know in Bermuda and Australia. And flush type toilets are not the only option, I have crapped in more than a few toilets on world travels without any running water.

That's probably not the primary problem on the minds of people in charge. IMO it's probably more just safety concerns. In the cases where you're actually dropping supplies from a hovering helicopter (I've seen that happening with the Blackhawks) or even bigger parachute-assisted drops from a cargo plane, anyone on the ground is vulnerable to injury if something lands on them. If you're desperately thirsty or hungry, people are going to run towards anything they see being dropped, and probably will try to stand underneath and "catch" anything. Of course, killing people unintentionally by dropping a pallet of supplies on them is also very problematic so you have to try and stay away from any people.

Then there's the chance of injury or even violence in the mad scramble for supplies, regardless of whether we're talking about supplies being distributed from a helicopter, a truck, or even a building. That's why you need security to organize the people once you actually get supplies to some location.

I saw one helicopter distribution that seemed to be organized. The Airborne guys got to the clearing first and set up a perimeter, the chopper landed and unloaded the supplies without crowds swarming the aircraft, and then...well, actually, I forget if CNN showed the actual distribution part. Anyway, that seems like the way it should go, although the actual amount of supplies you can load on a Blackhawk are not all that much.

Arney - that sounds like a better strategy. If the helo's could pick a relatively empty landing area - then land quickly and unload the supplies before the helicopter gets mobbed.

It would still be nice of some crew member from the helo's would post some actual pix from Haiti. If anyone sees these photo's on the Internet ... please post alink here.

other Pete

It's a shame that all the self proclaimed experts aren't in Haiti right now, from the General (Ret) who sits, well fed, hydrated and comfortable in an air-conditioned television studio telling doctors on the scene to "man up" to those who pontificate on web forums.

JohnE

We should probably all be down there - all of us on this fourm.
-------------------------------------

Here's another report from Reuters about the looting in Haiti. This problem may settle down a bit, once 2200 US Marines are deployed into the country ...
------

"PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) – U.S. troops protected aid handouts and the United Nations sought extra peacekeepers to bolster security in earthquake-shattered Haiti on Monday as marauding looters emptied wrecked shops and tens of thousands of survivors waited desperately for food and medical care.

Hundreds of scavengers and looters swarmed over wrecked stores in downtown Port-au-Prince, seizing goods and fighting among themselves, but some signs of normality returned as street vendors emerged with fruit and vegetables for sale.

"We do not have the capacity to fix this situation. Haiti needs help ... the Americans are welcome here. But where are they? We need them here on the street with us," said policeman Dorsainvil Robenson, deployed to chase looters in the capital."

other Pete

Regarding the article, this is one instance I really wish I hadn't been right. Human nature is just too predictable. And wasn't it Sue that stated early on that in this instance what we see as looting the victims are seeing as survival. If DW and DS are dieing of thirst and/or starving you'd better believe I would do the same.

General Honore walked the walk during Katrina, which gives him room to talk the talk now.

Based on his actions then, I have no doubt that he would not have permitted leaving patients unattended without an actual threat to go without reprimand. And I would _not_ want to be the security squad chief who decided to withdraw for the night rather than stay at the site and support the medical personnel.

The bottom line is that Sanjay Gupta stayed and the patients lived. The Belgian doctors ran and abandoned their patients, not in response to an actual threat.

Had the Belgians had even false reports of a mob or other threat that mitigate their behavior, but apparently that's not the case.

"Do Not Abandon A Patient In Distress" is right up there with The 10 Commandments for most doctors I've known. Sanjay Gupta did not, whatever his motives, and the Belgians did, apparently before having reason to do so. The Belgians are more likely to have to explain themselves back home than Sanjay Gupta.

He, the general, is not there, he doesn't know the facts behind anyone's decision to do anything in Haiti. He came late to the party after Katrina, he attempted to enforce martial law there when it hadn't been declared. He now makes a living second guessing what others do, he'd fit right in around here. He had no authority to do some of the things he tried to do in New Orleans, he has no authority, moral or otherwise to make unfounded comments on volunteers who are actually on the ground in Haiti, not sitting comfortably in a television studio. If he feels that others need to "man up" why isn't he doing the same?

Nobody on this forum knows any of the details behind Dr. Gupta's actions or the actions of any other medical personnel in Haiti other than what's being reported. Like so many other times of disaster, both personal and large, everyone is jumping to conclusions based on what they've heard and seen on television. I'll wait and see what the real facts before jumping to any conclusions about the courage of Dr. Gupta or the lack of it by the doctors from Belgium. Obviously everyone else can do as they please.

This is what Sanjay was reporting as the Belgians were preparing to pull out for the night:


Sanjay and this field hospital were in a particularly impoverished part of the city (I forget the name of the place) so I'm not surprised that there was already some trouble in that area.

I was even reading on an Israeli news site that the Israelis also suspended operations at night early on (it's not clear if the article was talking about the field hospital or their SAR teams but I thought it was referring to their medical operations) so the Belgians are not the only ones being cautious.

"He, the general came late to the party after Katrina, he attempted to enforce martial law there when it hadn't been declared."

I'm wondering where you got your information. I understood that he and his guys were standing by, waiting for Katrina to make up her mind which way she was turning. And he isn't allowed to move until the military was invited by the governor of the state involved.

As to martial law, he said he didn't see anything that required martial law to be envoked. The people at the Superdome were quiet and patient. The people at the convention center were calm, mainly going after water, food and usable stuff like mattresses to set on the ground.

He WAS the one who objected to the soldiers (NG, I think) who were delivering food going around with their rifles at the ready like they were in downtown Baghdad. Right in front of the news cameras, Honore' was yelling at them: "Get those rifles down -- you're delivering food! GET THOSE G** D*** RIFLES DOWN!" For which he got into trouble, because the twit who was told/had agreed to get the word to the soldiers NOT to wave their guns around, didn't do so.

Sue

Pretty harsh, John, especially to those of us on the forum who are following the story, talking our way through the info being presented by the media, and simply trying to make some sense out of the madness. Speaking of madness, I had CNN on last night and saw a clip about looters taking candles from a store, and the tail end of another where a boy had been hurt badly in the head, bleeding and all and noone but the reporter would help. Didn't catch why or how the boy was hurt though. Also a clarification of the roadblocks mentioned earlier in the thread. It appears the roadblocks are being set up by storeowners to prevent looters from ransacking their stores before the store owners can get their stuff out.
I am trying to keep in mind, and all of us should, that the media people are finding the stories that present the best and worst of mankind, the most sensationalized things they can find to get ratings, as they do in any situation. Many are the stories in the media about our area of Kentucky that depict us as uneducated toothless drug addicts without a pot to p--- in. They never show you the people with college educations (myself included) who live in neighborhoods of modern homes (running water and flushing toilets and everything, sorry sue). That's not what sells advertising, and not what draws Americans to the television to see people worse off than they are so they can feel better about themselves.
Sorry, off my soap box now. Point is anything in the media has to be taken with a grain (or shaker) of salt. Anything we see is only a tiny fraction of a much larger whole. Certainly with regards to Haiti we are only seeing a small part of the whole story that is unfolding.

Well, no. The problem with the term 'Worst case scenario' is that its factually incorrect. Yes, its very, very bad, but could it have been worse? Yes. Much.

When planning perhaps the term " very bad case" leaves room for some error.

On the subject of aerial resupply there does seem to be trouble with the helicopters flying in supplies. It is mostly due to them not having anywhere to safely land without undue hazard to people on the ground or the aircrews themselves. I am very hopeful that there will soon be an influx of civilian heavy helicopters that are set up for long-line delivery of loads.

Most military helicopters, nor the crews, are set up for/trained to accomplish accurate long-line delivery. They are for a short 20' line but you still need lots of clear space. By using a 100' or longer line the aircraft never needs to land at the pickup or delivery area and can place a load in a very tight area, even the back of a truck. A small area would be much easier to secure and then fill up with multiple slingloads of water, food, and supplies for distribution.

This method would save a lot of time and drastically reduce the need for tedious and dangerous convoys. It is also much faster for the crews to just release the remote hook at the bottom of the line and let the ground folks distribute from the load rather than have the aircraft idle on the ground, risking numerous people, while lines of people pass individual cases of goods off the aircraft.

The same is true from the beginning, you don't need to load the helicopter item by item. A team of people can rig a palletized load for air transport in minutes. Many of the supplies are already palletized when they come off a plane or ship.

As far as I can tell there are no civilian helicopters headed there yet for external load work. I hope and pray that someone gets their act together and gets the ball rolling, and quick.

I'm packed and ready.

One problem with helicopters is that they require a tremendous amount of maintenance - this isn't a truck that might need an oil change after a few months, but rather a machine that's going to spend significant time at the shop *every* *week* at these usage levels. It would be even worse in a harsher desert climate due to sand, perhaps spending more than 50% of time in the shop.

This is the biggest advantage to having an amphibious assault group around: they have the ability to maintain large numbers of helicopters, while at sea, for a long period of time.

In Haiti bringing in large numbers of helicopters for distribution efforts starts a clock ticking: within a week you're going to need to divert incoming supplies from food & water to maintenance crews, tools & parts.

An interesting post, Awayagain.

I'm just curious, but how would civilian helicopters get to Haiti? I don't expect to see the US Navy giving a bunch of civilian helicopters a lift to Port Au Prince. Transported on cargo ships? Or is Haiti close enough to fly to directly for these birds?

For anyone interested here's a blog from a doctor in Haiti with graphic photos at the bottom. Interesting example of people using whatever is available to do what needs to be done. Almost unbelievable that in 2009 they had to resort to booze and a hacksaw. Wow.

Oh, I just remembered something Lt. Gen. Honore' said, that local governments (like state) plan for the best-case scenario, and then wonder why they get into trouble when hit with a worst-case situation.

He said governors deals with impending disasters like this: "We can handle it. We can handle it. We're fine... Oh, SH**!!! HELP!"

That isn't a plan.that's wishful thinking, and has nothing to do with real life.

Sue

Graphic photos from haiti six days after the quake:
Haiti: Six Days Later

The one of the doctor using a hacksaw to amputate a woman's leg really brought home what Hell they are currently in...especially when you realize they ran out of anethesia and pain killers days ago...

It's like doing medicine back in the Civil War.

-Blast

There is some horrible imagery in there.

I hope the rescuers/military can settle things down soon and get help to those who need it most.

In reference to the earlier comments on this thread about the Belgians. It's been my experience that doctors and nurses who travel to these disaster zones are very compassionate people - and they work tremendously hard. In fact, the biggest problem usually is that they tend to overwork themselves ... and eventually become exhausted. So as a rule - humanitarian teams don't decide to leave patients behind in am emergency.

Therefore, it's a pretty good bet that whatever factors alarmed the Belgians, they must have been very concerned about the safety of their volunteers. It is tough working in these third world environments. There are always some "bad actors" out there on the streets. Haiti has got some very bad gangs. The Belgian team did pretty well by trying to set up shop in a poor area of Port au Prince.

I maintain a rule with my own teams that I will never allow people to be working in questionable areas after dark - in the third world. It's usually a recipe for crime and disaster.

I think what really went wrong is that there was a fundamental breakdown in security. The Belgians were overly optimistic that they could handle the situation, and they just did not have the kind of security they needed to really operate in that kind of environment. Hopefully ... the arrival of US marines will go a long way towards sorting out the safety situation in Haiti's capital.

And I agree with Sheriff Blast - things are getting pretty grim when victims must go through amputations with just alcohol and a saw.

other Pete

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2010/01/20/intv.keen.holmes.cnn?hpt=T2

Apparently an additional 20,000 Haitians are now dying now every day according to NGOS due to the lack of Medical supplies/Field Hospitals and medical staff that have been given a low priority to gaining access to the Haitian capital via the airfield.

Also looking at the photos now coming out of Haiti, starvation will soon start to take effect within the next 7 days. After 7 days the Haitians in the photographs are now noticeably thinner.

If the controlling authorities cannot even prioritise medical aid flights within the first 7 days over political photo opportunities then I don't actually have much hope that they will be able to cope with the next relief effort crisis of a starving population. No doubt the media will start to concentrate on the so called 'looting' activities of the desperate and starving Haitians as an excuse that 'we can't do anything until these folks start to behave.'

That is simply not true AFLM, please review the CNN.com video that you post a URL to: the Haitians have identified medical supplies and medical staff as having the highest priority; air traffic controllers are giving medical supplies and staff the highest priority on arrival, e.g. if 3 planes are waiting to land, if controllers know that the cargo on one plan is medical supplies and staff, they will give that plane landing priority. The General in charge (Keen) of the airport says exactly this several minutes into the interview. He also cites an example from yesterday where a medical flight was turned away, Gen. Keen says it was because they didn't know that it carried medical supplies.

The airfield is a bottleneck, but medical flights are a high priority, not a low priority.

What else would you expect the General to say. He's not likely to admit that the highest priority goes to the evacuation of US nationals, orphans waiting to go to adoptive families, and politicians who want to do photo opportunities. To say that the ATCs don't know what is on a flight is a poor excuse, especially when his initial reaction was to start to blame the non existent Haitian government. The US military has had the airfield under their control for 7 days now and the obvious requirement would be to prioritize these flights based on the aid/equipment so as to generate a landing slot time via electronic communications from their operations room, prior to the ATC, without having to ask such questions to the pilot circling above. Do you really think that 5 flights from the NGO 'Doctors without Borders' which have been turned away from landing haven't communicated what aid they are carrying to the US military authorities running the airfield. Its either incompetence or something else has a higher priority. Perhaps the AT controller should have turned around the Secretary of State and the ex President (low aid priority) as the ATC would have known what these aircraft were carrying in favour of absolutely anything else especially when the ATC turned around one of the MSF flights about 2-3 days ago.

As the NGOs on the ground had indicated many days ago, they were concerned/uneasy that the Haiti mission has been Militarized. Civilian NGO operations in military chains of command get short shrift, so I'm not really surprised at what the military regards a high priority. They regard their own operations as having the highest priority.

It quite hard to carry boxes of medicine/rations/water with M4s swigging around soldiers and Marines necks.

"What else would you expect the General to say." You could have ended your response there, AFLM, because it shows the level of integrity you think is on the ground at the airport. The rest is just supposition and I have to say a bit of bile. I don't know what General Keen's response to the 5 flights by Doctors without Borders would be because he didnt' address that - but unless all 5 flights were turned away yesterday, I don't see your point. The airport has a capacity, up from an initial 30 to approximately 115 flights a day. That's a fact. And it hasn't always been 115 flights, more like 60-80 flights / day for the first week - depending on conditions on the ground, yes, 5 Drs without Borders inbounds might be turned away, one per day or all on a day, as they simply could have no where to land. That's a hard fact too. I suppose the situation could be split down the middle - the medical priority may not have been established until just recently, before which lots of medical aid could be turned away without justification. Lessons learned, quickly we hope. Adapt, and overcome - its someone's motto anyway.

And I assume by ex President you are referring to UN Special Envoy for Haiti President William Clinton: if you want to suggest that the government of Haiti shouldn't give any landing privilege to the UN envoy then I guess I have to give up on convincing you otherwise. No, he didn't deliver a stand up medical clinic, but he came in with a shipment of medical and other relief supplies. Honestly I have no idea on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or what weight she has in established priorities, but between them that's at most 2 flights in 7 days.

Personally if I were to have any bile it would be for the surfeit of reporters on the ground - whose space did they take up on an inbound flight, from what relief supplies are they fed and watered while on the ground in Port au Prince: how many life-saving meals are they eating while they are there. A local Seattle TV affiliate has no less than 2 reporters in Port au Prince right now, a condition probably duplicated across the other 37 major US media markets. Apparently they can't rely on a network pool reporter to report the news, they need to be in Haiti during this early phase, reporting on who knows what.

The majority of armed forces throughout the world do not have integrity (no matter what Military Personnel involved would like to think), they just follow orders from the top down. Thats how they get things done. They are tools to do someone else's political bidding. The General in charge has his orders and his priorities and he will be carrying them out to the best of his abilities within the framework he has been given.



This is the main problem I have with the current setup in response to the military operations in Haiti in response to the Earthquake. Its the NGOs operating in Haiti that currently in the country have been there, done that, and not the General in charge of USSOUTHCOM. There isn't time to go through the learning curve required for the delivery of humanitarian assistance to such a large disaster.

http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/international/2010/01/20/bs.penhaul.haiti.us.troops.cnn&hpt=P1



There is no Haitian Government, they have no say in what is going on, despite the propaganda. Even during the first day after the Earthquake the President of Haiti was caught attempting to get out of dodge by a news reporter. The rest of the Haitians who survived the earthquake who attempted to previously run the country weren't far behind trying to get out of dodge. The Haitian government was a corrupt puppet regime at the best of times.



The US military was in charge of the Airfield in Port-au-Prince apparently just a few hours after the Earthquake. Perhaps that question of priorities for the authorities in charge of the airfield about getting the news media into the country should be directed at them rather than me.

BTW its not 'bile' (it may seem that way) its just that the situation is now getting to the point where I can begin to see beginnings of 'the worst case scenario'. There appears to be little being done right now to mitigate what may well happen in the next few weeks.

Meanwhile back in the land armchair quarterbacking...oh wait, that's where we all are. Hmmm, I guess I just keep my mouth shut then since I don't know the whole story and will never except by going there myself. Anyone else who wants to complain about how things are being done down in Haiti is free to do so, but only if they are actually down there.

Have I made myself clear?

-Blast

I suspect a large part of this "very bad" scenario is simple logistics. Currently everything is coming into a very small airport or "over the beach". That is a significant limitation when managing supplies for a large group of people.

Using some grossly rounded numbers here is a quick and dirty analysis of the logistics challenge.

The news said they are up to about 115 landings per day. To simplify assume 150 landings, all C-17s - that is about 9,750 tons of cargo per day. If all of that was MRE's (really optimistic, my guess is the plane would be volume limited, not weight) you would have about 10,400 pallets of MREs or 3 meals per day (all pork and beans) for nearly 12 million people. Of course you would have no water, no medical gear, no generators, no transportation/fuel and no people.

Throw all of that other stuff on the airplanes and the amount of food drops very quickly, especially since you need to fly in all the fuel for the generators, the trucks and planes (though they may be carrying enough to fly out without refueling, which also impacts cargo capacity). With all the above I would be shocked if they were able to fly in more than 10-20% of the raw number above. If we assume a mix of aircraft the number goes even lower since most commercial airplanes are seriously volume limited compared to the C-17.

Similar quick and dirty look at using helicopters. A single SH-60 Navy Seahawk can carry about 1000lbs which would be just about 1,800 servings of MRE pork and beans. If you are carrying water, you are only going to deliver about 100 gallons per trip. Both of these assume that weight not volume is the limiting factor which is probably a poor assumption.

Airplanes and helicopters are quick but bulk cargo needs a port. One of the military folks on the news yesterday pointed out that it takes over 150 airplanes to carry what a single freighter handles. That is why the loss of the port facilities is so critical.

- Eric

This reply is to both the previous posts: Arney & James (pg. 11)

First, Haiti is indeed close enough to easily fly a helicopter from Florida. The jump off point most likely being West Palm Beach and then just follow the Bahamas to Haiti. Depending on the range and speed it should be an easy day of flying.

Where to get fuel would be a concern but Cap Haitien would be a good landing point. With the Navy in PAP there is plenty of Jet-A but a coordination would definitely be necessary to get some. Fuel supplies at other support airfields will certainly be beefed up soon to accommodate the influx.

Second, maintenance is not as bad as you might think. Due to the ocean air you are more concerned about corrosion but if you can rinse your engines and a quick hose down each day (you don't need drinkable water for that) it would go a long way towards keeping things in good shape. The birds can be outside a hangar for months with proper care and most field maintenance is exactly that, in the field. Even if a major component comes due while you are there you have either planned ahead and taken a spare with you or something can be shipped to you. It may be more difficult right now but certainly doable.

We routinely spend months on the road during fire season with a crew of 3, 4, or 5 if we really need to (2 pilots included). We also can fly 8 hour days for long periods without any major maintenance. We operate primarily out of helibases placed in fields, clearings, etc. Rarely do we sit on pavement.

You must know that civilian operations as compared to military are much different. Maintenance is kept to the same standard but the military often sends many more people than is really necessary for each aircraft. Some birds are absolute pigs when it comes to wrenching but others are remarkably easy to keep up with. If you fly a pig then you have to crew it. I don't fly a pig.

I do see that at least one civilian S-58T (OLD aircraft) is there in the area now. That is just the beginning. This event will last for many months and will surely eventually transition away from U.S. Military to U.N. or other control. Other operators and contractors will be there for the long haul.

The company I work with spent 13 months in New Orleans after Katrina. We were there long after the press moved on to other excitement. Haiti is way worse off than N.O. ever was.

Maybe some of y'all don't get the same news I do, but living right outside FT Bragg, the local stations have all sent reporters and the coverage has been extensive.

First off, for anyone doubting the idea they are trying to get food and supplies on the ground - troops were held back as all the planes leaving were being loaded with food and water and med supplies. The troops got to sit around for as long as two days waiting on flights. The "main airport" there in Port Au Prince isn't all that big, and the bottleneck is getting planes in, unloaded and back out for another load.

Second - the remark about M4s is way off base. Most of the troops have grounded weapons and helmets. Unless they are on an active patrol, no weapons. However, the mere presence of the troops has done a lot to quell the looting and incipient rioting.

Third - The medics/doctors attached to the deployed units have been working overtime to provide what support they can. A station here showed regular troops helping to set up a civilian hospital that had just arrived right next to the aid station/triage area the 82d had already set up.

Finally - you have troops working 20+ hours a day handing out food and water. Granted, they are not trained to be peacekeepers in the sense that the UN troops are - meaning our guys don't take bribes, black market supplies and rape women. Instead they do what they can with what they have. They attempt to keep some semblance of order and help those that need it, in this case, the entire freaking country. These are guys who were finally home from a year's deployment to Afghanistan and now they get to spend at least 30 days if not more in Haiti. Instead of ragging on them, give them some credit.

I say Kudos to everyone on the ground lending a hand in Haiti. Be they security, medical, supply, or reporting on what's going on to the rest of the world. We can criticize all we want, but if no one went, I believe the outcome would be far worse. Better to have a bit of disorganization and perhaps some ego issues and still have rescued over 100 people from being buried alive. Haiti was in an emergency condition before the earthquake. For many people there, they are getting treated better than they have been in a long time. It is unfortunate so many have died, and many more are still suffering. Doing something, even if it is not enough to help everyone, is still better than doing nothing. No doubt things could be going better than they are now. There's certainly room for improvement. Bear in mind, we all could've just done nothing. Nobody was required to respond.

I prefer to focus on the positive. Today, a little boy's life was saved and he gets to keep both his legs because a handful of people were willing to use their skills without compensation and in primitive conditions, and they could just as easily have said no. I call that a good thing, and that is enough for me to know for today. The rest is just trivia.

I wonder how much more medical supplies or medical personnel could have been flown in, in place of the reporters or the Clinton's and their staffs?

No complaints, just some comments and observations. I can see both sides. For starters, I agree with Ben that some help is better than none and no one said we had to go there in the first place. But obviously going there is the right thing to do. On the other hand the horrid images we are being overwhelmed with from the media make us question whether any real help is actually there. I am trying to take the media images with a grain of salt but it is still extremely frustrating.

In response to Stu, the supplies that may have been flown in in place of reporters and observers are probably negligible, and who says they didn't come in with a load of supplies anyway? We may never know. In addition, the observers are neccessary. The organizations they represent cannot (nor can we) rely on the media to give us a completely accurate account of the goings on in Haiti. We are getting only bits and pieces and putting the pieces together with a lot of assumptions to get a distorted big picture. Even if they are taking the place of a flight of supplies, the observers are absolutely neccessary so that they can report back about what is going on to get more relief on the way. And only by being there and speaking to the people already there can they know for sure what supplies are needed most. Water? Food? Medicine? Obviously, but what about other less obvious supplies. I am not even sure what those might be. Nonetheless they are a neccessary part of the equation. The reporters perhaps less so although without media coverage the reaction to the situation would have been a lot slower and perhaps in some instances nonexistent. Their impact on us is evident by the comments in this thread.

Think of the days before satellite link-ups and the such. The media outlets with their images, stories and interviews provide a valuable link to the rest of the world in presenting and perhaps even pushing relief efforts. I am sure that many individuals, corporations and organizations have made donations based upon this connection to the Haitian disaster and Haitian people through these news reports. In fact the news coverage likely has accomplished more initially in helping the Haitian people than many of the other efforts underway.

Pete

This effect was demonstrated when the Burma regime refused U.N. aid and international reporters access after hurricane "Nargis" in 2008 (I've heard estimates of about 60.000 casualties after that one). Some organizations were granted access, but fund raising was noticeably harder for this catastrophe versus others. Main reason is likely no on-site media coverage.

well said

Moab

Here are some reporter's notes from the CBC. Probably stories that didn't make the main newscast. Worth browsing through IMO. For example, private companies stepping up; and other uses for Tiger Balm.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/01/21/f-haiti-notebook.html

A few people reacted badly to this post. I just ran across a report from Save The Children on child abuse by UN peacekeepers and other officials titled No One To Turn To. Haiti has been particularly victimized in the past.

A stunning and sobering document. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

The vast majority of people who serve in humanitarian and peacekeeping roles do so with honour and integrity. It is not fair to tar them with the same brush. The world needs more like them.

However, those individuals who have chosen to dishonour their mission, their uniform, and their nation with criminal behaviour are beneath contempt. They have become part of the problem, and are deserving of swift justice IMO.

Something to think about; it's been over two weeks since the earthquake trashed the city's plumbng. Where are these 2 million people going potty?

The subject of emergency bathroom facilities has come up on this board a number of times, but I can't imagine getting a whole city to treat waste properly...

-Blast, stocking up on more soap and some rubber boots...

Especially when they weren't doing much about it prior to the earthquake.

Blast we can only hope it is not contaminating their drinking water. But that is a very likely possibility. Let's hope our friends and loved ones who are over there don't run out of purified drinking water. And let's hope that the Haitians don't end up with even bigger problems after it is all said and done (like no non-contaminated drinking water). I think everyone will agree they've suffered enough already. But the totality of the relief effort there will likely go on long after the injuries have been treated and the debris has been cleaned up.

It was before the earthquake, I can't imagine it would get better afterwards. Cholera was already an issue in Haiti.

If the relief effort is limited to restoring Haiti to what it was prior to the quake, then we won't have done much to help them. We need to be in it for a pound this time. Unfortunately, I am not sure the American will is durable enough today to sustain the effort long enough to make a permanent difference.

I know the Red Cross is heavy into the water purification effort - I can't recall the exact stats, but I think the initial commitment was clean water for 200,000 people (27 settlements). The US military and UN have even greater commitments.

Without a plan its status quo for Port au Prince, London at the turn of the 18th century - crapping in pails, dumped into the surface sewer gutter in the center of streets, running to gulleys and eventually the sea. With a sewer plan, you can lay lines to sewage treatment plants during reconstruction, train Haitians as engineers, and enter the 20th century if not the 21st. Primary sewage treatment is among the least expensive upgrades available to emerging nations - and with better than 50% of structures partially or totally demolished, running sewer lines to new construction is a no brainer. Assuming the Haitians have a plan. They'll need some engineers on loan for that, which shouldn't be too difficult from the US, Japan, EU etc etc.

Anyway, some part of Port au Prince will be rebuilt this way, and the part that is not will eventaully go the way that alot of older European construction did once central plumbing came on the scene - tear down (again) and rebuild (again). A house without plumbing can't compete with houses up the street that have it.

A key to a potential successful rebuild will have to be the basic economy. If Haiti is unable to export some useful products to the rest of the world, their economy will remain in chaos. Upgrading the quality of life for the Haitian people will never come about, unless there is some mechanism for importing fresh and sustainable capital. Building homes and a supporting sanitation infrastructure is useless, unless the people can afford to purchase said home, which requires short and long-term employment.

Having spent time in Ecuador another very poor country, improving the lives of the rural community is very very difficult. Ecuador has many advantages over Haiti since it does have significant export, tourism and a growing middle class, but even with all of those advantages, the poor remain poor and the infrastructure in most rural communities is declining. The challenges Haiti faces are very complex and will not be cured by a superficial “makeover”, it will require a fundamental changes in their society and to be successful will take much time and careful planning.

My 2 cents-
Pete

Don't forget water purification tablets!

Even in areas where the ground-water still seems reliable so many refugees can be a problem. You really need experienced teams to look at where the well is, where the refugees go - and where the refugees "go" - to make sure there is no contamination now, in the next heavy rain, and in the next hurricane. It's easy for relief efforts to poison surviving groundwater, and it's happened before.

(the Bangladesh arsenic disaster is different, but is another example showing that above all else, existing clean water must be protected, and that being a well-meaning relief agency is no substitute for rigorous engineering assessment)

I agree. I think the last time Haiti was a profitable exporter was during its time as a colonial sugar plantation. And there's no way their farmers can compete with cheap, imported US grain. Haiti is pretty much an agrarian state that doesn't seem to be set up to support large urban populations but I never hear this mentioned. No one ever asks what kind of economy Haiti can support on its own. Maybe cause the answers aren't what people want to hear.

I agree with ParamedicPete's observation, I didn't meant to treat the sewage issue in isolation or before economic development - some one asked where the people were crapping and pissing, my point was absent a change in urban development patterns they'll crap where they always have, and it will end up where it always goes.

Sadr City was pretty much in the same state when I got there. Raw sewage running curb to curb down some streets. It took us 4 months to get just two lines back up and running. Then they wouldn't let us back in there to finish the rest. All that raw sewage just ran into the Tigris unprocessed.

Poverty and corruption are the same wherever you go.

As for drinking water, Haiti averages 54" of rainfall per year, with a usual minimum of a little over an inch in the two driest months. Rainwater collection is the cheapest and cleanest drinking water available anywhere, and doesn't need treatment if it isn't contaminated after it lands. If they aren't using it as a source of drinking water, they should be.

A 20x20' hut with a cheap coated steel roof (~$400 retail) and some rain barrels ($50 each, retail) would be a relatively cheap way to provide drinking water for a family. Every inch of rain would provide about 250 gallons of clean water.

If a 200 x 40' community shed/farmer's market were built, that would provide 8,000 sqft of rainwater collection equaling about 5,000 gallons per inch of rain. Have that water run into a relatively cheap, locally-made (with local help or volunteers) covered concrete cistern for community use.

Both typhus and cholera are mainly transmitted by contaminated water. Remove the sources and remove much of the disease.

One of my previous posts sneered at flush toilets in Haiti. I had to go to work and didn't have the time to elaborate. Flush toilets are a waste of resources, esp in places like Haiti that don't have enough clean water to drink, much less for flushing toilets.

There are other options of safe waste management that are far cheaper, and require fewer resources than flush toilets. I don't think there is any worldwide law that you MUST have multi-million-dollar waste facilities. Using 20-25% of the total water usage in a household for a flush toilet is wasteful and stupid. And if anyone thinks sewers and septic tanks are the ideal way to safely dispose of human waste, you really need to do some research and educate yourself. Every time you use a flush toilet, much of it eventually ends up in a water supply.

A woman in Africa came up with the idea of movable village outhouses: dig a hole, place the outhouse over it. When it gets nearly full, move the outhouse, fill in the top part of the hole with soil, and plant a fruit tree. Repeat. The tree uses the waste to grow fruit.

Cattails grow in Hait. Cattail marshes can be used to clean gravity-fed wastewater (solids removed first, usually), and one acre of cattails can be harvested to process methanol, to the tune of 8,000-10,000 gallons of methanol per acre. And they don't need a multi-billion dollar distillery, either. All they need is a smart farmer with some scrap metal and a welding unit. The Haitians could use locally-made alcohol for cooking and running vehicles.

There are reasonably-priced options, but it takes some common sense and some thinking. Why anyone would think flush toilets and highly-mechanized processes would work in Haiti isn't thinking very clearly. Clean water and decent waste management would solve many of Haiti's problems, and possibly even provide some jobs. Is that too much to expect?

Sue

Good news for Haitians, FEMA trailers may be coming....

[ I say in jest ]


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100129/ap_on_bi_ge/us_leftover_trailers_haiti;_ylt=AhzH40dvLt.0qRm0pKHoZ6eb.HQA;_ylu=X3oDMTNmOW92aG1mBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAwMTI5L3VzX2xlZnRvdmVyX3RyYWlsZXJzX2hhaXRpBGNjb2RlA21vc3Rwb3B1bGFyBGNwb3MDMQRwb3MDMQRzZWMDeW5fdG9wX3N0b3JpZXMEc2xrA3B1c2h0b3NlbmRmZQ--


Push to send FEMA trailers to Haiti stirs backlash

Bidding is under way in an online government-run auction to sell the trailers in large lots at bargain-basement prices — something the RV industry fears will reduce demand for new products. Some of the bids received so far work out to less than $500 for a trailer that would sell for about $20,000 new.

Lobbyists for the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association — which includes some major manufacturers in Elkhart, Ind., among them Gulf Stream — have been talking with members of Congress, the government and disaster relief agencies to see if it would be possible to send the trailers to Haiti instead.

"This isn't really the best time for the RV industry to have very low-priced trailers put out onto the market," said the group's spokesman, Kevin Broom.

Sue,

If you run for president, you've got my vote.


Seriously.


I think the rest of us go to sewers, toilets, etc as an upgrade for Haiti because, other than an outhouse, it's all that we know. Guess we just figure it was an upgrade from outhouses here in the US so everyone else in the world should follow suit. Sometimes we just don't realize the impact even the smallest of our actions will have on our planet. Your posts elsewhere have me thinking about reducing our trash generation further so now we are composting our food scraps. Something we should have been doing all along but just never occurred to us. I would like to reduce it even further but at this point I am not really sure what else to do. We started recycling again since DS joined cub scouts. We currently recycle aluminum pop cans, cardboard and glass. That combined with composting the food scraps has reduced our trash generation considerably. At this point plastic is the next big thing ... and the empty metal soup cans. Wish I knew what I could do with those. We can't recycle plastic or other metals. I have thought about some large bins in the garage to save plastic bottles and saving the cans to use for experiments making mini hobo stoves or something similar. Not sure what to do about other plastics. I was going to save it to melt down for whatever use but I am wondering if it would release any harmful fumes. Sorry to digress from the OT. Let's get back on track shall we.

P.S. Sue, how about a thread about ways we can reduce and reuse trash as mentioned above.