Haiti Aid Bottleneck: Diversify Distribution Routes, Targets
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Related subjects: Americas, Diplomacy & Politics, Extreme Weather Events, Global, Haiti, Humanitarian Crisis, J.E. Robertson, Obama administration, Security & Surveillance, The Global Intercept, U.S. news Comments Off
The bottleneck problem is center stage, as the volume of aid appears to outpace the remaining transport infrastructure for getting it where it needs to go. Today, Haitian authorities have complained there may be too exclusive a focus on the capital Port-au-Prince, causing some heavily devastated population centers to be left unattended, by comparison.
The small airport is one of the main problems: able to use only one “apron” of the landing surface, due to quake-related damage, and having to fashion an ad-hoc air-traffic control system to attend to the vastly expanded volume of air traffic, some of which is reportedly en route to Haiti before the new system has been able to register official flight plans, the aid operation is facing a very real problem of traffic as against airport capacity.
Amphibious landing craft are being deployed to help open new avenues of aid delivery and evacuation assistance, but overcoming the bottleneck effect will require a fanning out across not just the capital but the optimum locations across the disaster zone. Within the capital, there are a number of focus-areas that are reported to be hard to reach, or where the uprooting of the population has left a power vacuum, but no shortage of victims in need of medical care, food aid and water.
As aid flows into Haiti but is only slowly but increasingly being dispersed more widely to those in need, two top US officials recently back from Haiti, SouthCom deputy commander Lt. Gen. Ken Keen and USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah, spoke with CBS’s Bob Schieffer about breaking the bottleneck at Port au Prince airport.
The initial U.S.-led international response, Shah indicated, was focused on urban search and rescue — saving lives of those caught in the rubble. In parallel, there was an immediate effort to secure thousands of tons of commodoties, but whose distribution is being organized in extremely logistically complicated circumstances, and will now be aided by more military assets on the ground.
Administrator Shah told CBS’ ‘Face the Nation’ that “We had — the first people on the ground were our urban search-and-rescue teams. These are teams of more than 70 people each. We have five in right now. And so we have a few hundred professionals, well equipped with dogs, out there saving people.” He also acknowledged the need for action to break the bottleneck to allow more aid to flow freely to the victims of the quake, specifically saying “We now need to expand alternate routes, including port-sea access”.
He also said USAID is working closely with the US military and Haitian authorities “to dramatically expand the in-country distribution network”. Reaching specific focal points across the landscape of the disaster zone is a desperately urgent project, but one complicated by the near total lack of information about precisely where in the outlying cities and towns the most pressing need exists.
The Canadian Press is reporting:
Prayers of thanksgiving and cries for help rose from Haiti’s huddled homeless Sunday, the sixth day of an epic humanitarian crisis that was straining the world’s ability to respond and igniting flare-ups of violence amid the rubble of Port-au-Prince.
Haitian police struggled to scatter hundreds of stone-throwing looters in the city’s Vieux Marche, or Old Market. Elsewhere downtown, amid the smoke from bonfires burning uncollected bodies, gunfire rang out and bands of machete-wielding young men roamed the streets, faces hidden by bandanas.
Some aid workers have insisted the level of violence has been remarkably low, given the widespread deprivation, mass death and immense stress the population is suffering. The very real public health risk posed by unattended decaying bodies has led to actions that many believe are inhumane or severe, such as the dumping of bodies in mass graves and the summary burning of corpses in the streets.
It remains unclear whether this has been the most effective means available to the population of Haiti or to Haitian authorities to deal with the health perils posed by the bodies of the dead. Somewhat underreported in mass media coverage has been the behind the scenes effort to gather information and to deploy makeshift solutions for the prevention of mass spread of contagious or water-borne diseases.
News of gunfire and of machete-wielding gangs is disturbing, and it remains unclear at this time if such news is evidence of a descent into chaos or if the population is attempting to take security precautions, in the absence of stable government authority. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in New Orleans, there were reports of armed youths using their weapons and street-level organization to create a temporary authority aimed at preventing harm to women and children and allowing medicine and water to go to the elderly and infirm.
Numerous survivors testified that if not for some of these youths, they or their loved ones would have died. But there were also numerous stories of armed gangs terrorizing refugee camps, even attacking and raping women. The chaos that bred a need for spontaneous authority also allowed for grave abuses.
As the bottleneck effect becomes more apparent and the problem of solving it more pressing, the population is reported to be growing restless. Jeff Glor, a correspondent for CBS News, told Bob Schieffer on ‘Face the Nation’ yesterday that:
… a couple days ago, I spoke to a woman who had three young children, three daughters between the ages of four and nine. Her leg was badly damaged in the quake. She was in her house when this happened. She was cooking a meal for her kids when this happened. She now can’t move.
She is responsible for three children, three young girls. When I spoke to them two days after the quake happened, they still had not eaten or drank anything. She said to me that she was convinced at that point that her children would die. Can you imagine what she’s going through right now? I asked her when this ends. She said, it ends when God arrives. That’s tragic.
Glor’s report clearly humanizes the crisis, by looking at it through the lens of one family. The desperation of that mother is clear and universal. What she might have to do to protect her children or to save their lives even she might not yet have imagined when she spoke with him. But the magnitude of the crisis in Haiti is that woman’s story multiplied by perhaps one million.
There are families where teenage children are now without parents, without protection, without provisions of any kind, and will have to imagine their own solution. Communities are banding together and churches are doing serious outreach to their neighbors, to try to reduce the amount of people tempted by or given to violence in finding sustenance.
Abroad, the charitable instinct seems to be more alive than at any time in recent memory. The world has been awakened to Haiti’s chronic state of hardship, by this unthinkable trauma. As Shannon Buggs so astutely observes, for the Houston Chronicle, Martin Luther King’s saying “Everybody can be great because everybody can serve” appears to be the most poignant of his messages of grace and giving on this celebration of his birth and commemoration of his life’s work.
But neither the vast resources of personnel or material aid have been able to be deployed across the disaster zone in the most effective way. This is, in part, owing to the near total collapse of Haiti’s transport infrastructure in the region affected. But it may also be owing to a method of planning for aid delivery based on the transport resources deployed — the other option would be to deploy far more (and more agile) transport resources according to a plan geared to achieve the maximum delivery of aid to the widest possible population.
If aircraft carriers could move closer to the shoreline, and massive military transport helicopters could deliver significant amounts of personnel and material aid (food, medicine, blood and water) to specific secure distribution launch points across the disaster zone, it would be possible to use a new level of air transport to get aid to more remote and isolated populations, without having to rely on air-drop (which many fear could lead to unrest, rioting and piracy).
With the arrival of 10,000 American military personnel, the coordination of such secure distribution launch points should be a priority, and efforts to effectively deliver aid to the population and to extract those in need of critical medical care, should be the first major actions put in motion by the expanded aid operation.
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