Haiti aid operation still has way to go, U.N. says
Providing shelter to an estimated 1 million homeless is first priority now that search and rescue efforts have ended and most life-threatening injuries have been treated, John Holmes said. “We still have a significant way to go before reaching everybody who needs food, and on the shelter side as well,” the U.N.'s emergency relief coordinator told a news briefing. “This is a potentially volatile environment and we have to make sure it doesn't degenerate from fights over food into more serious civil unrest,” he said. Some 7,000 tents have been distributed and another 50,000 tents are in the pipeline.
Phi Beta Iota: They appear to be feeding 140,000 or so a day (out of two million) and now tell us that 50,000 tents are planned for two million homeless who will not be under real shelter for 1-2 years. 40 people per sent, no sanitation, this just gets better and better.
Red Cross: Haiti airport remains major bottleneck
WASHINGTON — American Red Cross officials in Washington say there is a waiting list of 1,000 flights to land at Haiti's airport, hindering the delivery of relief supplies.
Phi Beta Iota: What part of triaging big air into little air and big boat cargo into small boat cargo are we not understanding here? The LAST place we need 1000 airplanes full of supplies is in Port-au-Prince. There is also no reason why we cannot be doing drive-by C-130s with pallets of water, food, tents, and sanitation tools and supplies. TWO MILLION out of ten million. This seems a fairly obvious challenge of scope and depth , what are we missing here, almost three weeks after these people were rendered homelesss? If the Red Cross were serious, which it is not, with 230 million of new dollars in the bank, it would be hiring fleets of small aircraft and logistics helicopters, gridding the island with an advance strategy created with the government and the US military, and putting the supplies where the people need to go to get out of the center of catastrophe, Port-au-Prince.
Haiti Crisis Prompts Fresh Talk of Pooling U.S. Relief Money
Disaster fund-raising rewards organizations for their marketing prowess and name recognition as much if not more than for the scope, relevance and quality of their emergency services.
Phi Beta Iota: We've seen this before. The Red Cross is the Enron of the relief community.
Tired of waiting, Haitians starting makeshift homes
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Defying pleas to wait for Haiti's reconstruction, families lugged heavy bundles of wood and tin up steep hillsides yesterday to do the unthinkable: Build new homes on top of old ones devastated in the earthquake.
Phi Beta Iota: We anticipated this two weeks ago, and called for the delivery of construction materials and the mobilization of every possible Red Hat (USAF), Sea Bee (USN) and US Army combat engineering unit, with the construction materials (heavy by definition) coming in via landing craft to each of the smaller ports and NOT into Port au Prince which is still not operational in the commercial sense of the word.
See also:
Journal: Haiti Rolling Directory from 12 January 2010
