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.