Monday, March 29, 2010

Caltrans Employees Step up to Help Rebuild Haiti

CALTRANS NEWS
MARCH 2010

Caltrans Employees Step up to Help Rebuild Haiti

By Herby Lissade, Chief, Office of Emergency Management

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck the island nation of Haiti. The epicenter was located about 10 miles west of Port-au-Prince. This enormous earthquake caused death and destruction that our part of the world had not seen in recent history. A tsunami, caused by the earthquake, also claimed lives along Haiti’s coast.


Pre-earthquake concrete homes under construction. These homes, located outside of Port-au-Prince, withstood the earthquake. However, the quake destroyed many concrete structures within the city.

More than 200,000 people lost their lives in the January 12 earthquake, almost all due to substandard building construction. Those who survived but had serious injuries, such as crushed limbs, soon succumbed to their injuries due to inadequate or nonexistent health care. Since the earthquake hit, the death toll has climbed to more than 300,000.

Help has poured in from all over the world to assist the people of this little island, including employees at Caltrans who would like to go to Haiti to help. The Caltrans Office of Emergency Management has received many inquiries from Caltrans employees of all classifications who want to assist Haiti in some way.

Caltrans cannot officially deploy employees to Haiti unless the California Emergency Management Agency (CalEMA) mission tasks the Department. CalEMA has done a great job preparing state agencies and departments for possible events in California similar to the one in Haiti. Caltrans has plans in place to respond to such an event, if one occurs here and affects our transportation system. CalEMA may also task Caltrans to assist beyond the limits of our transportation system. In the case of Haiti, Caltrans was on standby to provide equipment operators for debris removal and registered engineers, architects, and geologists as part of CalEMA’s Safety Assessment Program (SAP). The SAP sends groups of professionals, postdisaster, to assess infrastructure for recovery efforts, or simply put, to get people back into their homes as quickly as possible.

Caltrans has adopted the SAP as part of its Continuation of Operations Plan, commonly known as COOP, to help assess our infrastructure for all hazards we may encounter. The recent earthquake in Haiti was a reminder that California may experience a similar event. Caltrans took this as an opportunity to expand our SAP cadre. This is essential in predisaster planning for postdisaster recovery. It’s our goal to have every registered professional at Caltrans trained in the program.

As private citizens, many of us have donated money to Haitian relief funds, such as the International Red Cross. These nonprofit, nongovernment agencies are doing a great job feeding Haitians and providing them with much-needed health care. Some of you have expressed a desire to do more and apply your training and skills to assist the people of Haiti. So, Caltrans employees and professionals in New York and Florida, as private citizens, came together to form Haiti Engineering, Inc.

The engineers, planners, and others who make up Haiti Engineering do so for the greater good. Haiti Engineering is a nonprofit organization with highly skilled professionals who donate their time and expertise to assist the people of Haiti. We are here for the long haul. We partner with engineers and other professionals in Haiti to bring positive change.

Haiti Engineering’s vision is to help reconstruct an island nation not to pre-earthquake conditions, but to one that can sustain its people at levels that are acceptable in a modern nation.

While our mission is ambitious, we think it is achievable. Haiti Engineering’s mission is to bring together a group of professionals to develop a plan to help restore the infrastructure throughout the island nation of Haiti. We are planning to prepare the island for all hazards that they might encounter by using emergency management techniques and methods. We hope to instill in the people that they are the most important resource on the island, the “Human Capital.”

Finally, our goal is to create a 10-year master plan to help reconstruct the infrastructure in Haiti. The goal is to make the efforts sustainable for the island inhabitants for generations to come.

I would like to share what helped create Haiti Engineering, Inc. Shortly after the earthquake, Director Randy Iwasaki contacted me. He asked me how the quake impacted my family and if Caltrans had a plan to help Haiti that the Department could send to the Governor’s Office. It’s no surprise that our state was so responsive and wanted to help. California is earthquake country. We live with and prepare for these events. The Governor was sending urban search and rescue teams from California to Haiti as part of the first responder contingent. To paraphrase Director Iwasaki, technology exists that could mitigate the impacts of such an event. Caltrans has used that technology throughout our state, to harden our transportation infrastructure, and that technology could easily be applied to Haiti. Engineering techniques and construction inspection could have lessened the loss of life from the quake. Those Proven engineering methods have saved lives in California and will continue to do so if, or when, a major earthquake hits us here.


This movie theater in Port-au-Prince is an example of the common concrete structures throughout the city.

The earthquake in Haiti has affected my family and friends; I lost family members in the quake. It’s been a wake up call that life is precious and short. I plan to visit Haiti during March to reconnect with family members who I haven’t seen in years. I am going to take the opportunity to assess the quake’s damage first hand and assess which projects Haiti Engineering can try to fund through donations and deliver help. I will also see how Caltrans can apply the lessons learned from the Haitian response efforts to strengthen the Department’s response in a similar event.

In the end, Haiti Engineering hopes to help build structures, make recommendations to aid in rebuilding Haiti’s infrastructure, and assist where we can. In doing so, we hope to not only enrich the lives of those in Haiti, but enrich our own lives.

Caltrans employees are stepping up to lend a hand, not just within our state or across our great country, but between nations—something for which we can be truly proud.

You can visit the Haiti Engineering, Inc. Web site at www.HaitiEngineering.org.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Haiti’s Misery

Haiti’s Misery
Published: March 25, 2010


The emergency in Haiti isn’t over. It’s getting worse, as the outside world’s attention fades away.

Misery rages like a fever in the hundreds of camps sheltering hundreds of thousands of the 1.3 million people left homeless by the Jan. 12 earthquake. The dreaded rains have already swamped tents and ragged stick-and-tarp huts. They have turned walkways into mud lakes and made difficult or impossible the simple acts of collecting and cooking food, washing clothes, staying clean and avoiding disease. The rainy season peaks in May.

Worsening the weather crisis are the unchecked sexual assaults and rapes in the camps, where families are squeezed side by side in flimsy quarters and women and girls are left unprotected after dark.

A new report from Amnesty International affirms that security is inadequate, that police and soldiers are often missing, that every nightfall brings terror. Victims stay silent because rapists go uncaught and unpunished; what little policing exists is focused on other priorities.

Both the shelter and safety crises demand an urgent response, and while feelings of urgency abound in Haiti, their impact is only sporadically felt. The little country is swarming with well-intentioned organizations, each trying to do their little bit of help. One group is trying to distribute thousands of flashlights to women and girls. It’s a kind and practical gesture, but what they really need are shelters from sexual violence, and adequate policing. Haiti has neither, Amnesty International reports.

Any effective solution would need to be coordinated with the government of Haiti, whose leaders have been absent from the lives of Haitian citizens since the disaster. When former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton visited the capital of Port-au-Prince this week, they joined President René Préval in touring the camp in Champ de Mars, across the street from the slumped-over presidential palace. Screams of frustration greeted them. Where have you been? Why have you not helped us?

From the first days of this disaster, someone should have been racing to find places to build sturdy housing away from the densely crowded, quake-shattered capital. But the Haitian government only this week took the necessary step of invoking eminent-domain power to seize land. Sites have been identified, but the number of places available for new housing is still zero. Only a few hundred people have been moved from the camps.

We understand the government has been working hard to prepare for a donor conference next week, where big ideas for the future will be discussed. But back in old Haiti, land of tents and tarps, workers have been putting fresh coats of plaster and blue paint on buildings on the United Nations compound in Port-au-Prince, and the rest of the world is moving on.

Some United States troops have started going home. Overmatched workers for United Nations agencies and nongovernmental organizations are toiling away, many of them heroically. But ultimately progress must be judged by results. New ways must be found to solve problems, and urgency sustained. Haiti is in danger of becoming what it always was, a nagging blot on the conscience, a neglected project that never gets done.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 26, 2010, on page A26 of the New York edition.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Stars and Stripes

Lt. Gen. Keen: Our man on the ground in Haiti
By Seth Robson, Stars and Stripes
Online Edition, Saturday, March 27, 2010

Lt. Gen. Ken Keen looked down from a helicopter circling over earthquake-ravaged Port-au-Prince last Wednesday and saw a patchwork of multicolored tents that had sprouted among the Haitian capital's rusting corrugated iron roofs and collapsed buildings to house hundreds of thousands left homeless by the disaster. PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Lt. Gen. Ken Keen looked down from a helicopter circling over Port-au-Prince on a recent Wednesday and saw the big picture: a patchwork of multicolored tents that had sprouted amid the Haitian capital’s rusting corrugated iron roofs and collapsed buildings to house hundreds of thousands left homeless by January’s earthquake and aftershocks.

In a city where earthquake rubble still spills onto roads that are clogged with traffic and street vendors, a helicopter is often the quickest way for the Joint Task Force–Haiti commander to get from point A to point B.

The former paratrooper and special operations soldier, who spent much of his career training troops in Central America to fight communists, has been working without pause since the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake, supervising the massive U.S. military relief effort.

Keen was in Haiti on the day of the earthquake in his role as military deputy commander of U.S. Southern Command, talking to Haitian officials about disaster response. He has vivid memories of the giant temblor, which struck while he was chatting with U.S. Ambassador Kenneth H. Merten at his Port-au-Prince residence.

“We were sitting on the veranda on the back porch and there was a huge crash,” said Keen, of Hayden, Ky. “I heard what sounded like an [improvised explosive device] going off.”

The shaking, which started just before 5 p.m., got worse as the pair staggered into the yard, he said.

“It literally was shaking like in an Indiana Jones movie where you could barely stand up,” Keen said. “You had to brace yourself to keep from falling.”

Somehow the 1930s-era hilltop residence, near the Petionville Golf Club, remained standing. But as the soldier stared out over the city, he could see dust begin to rise.

“Buildings had collapsed and you could hear a lot of panic in the streets below,” he said. “It was clear there were going to be significant casualties.”

Soon, injured Americans started staggering into the ambassador’s residence and Haitian government officials arrived on motorcycles looking for U.S. military assistance. The first thing that Haitian President Rene Preval asked for was help running the capital’s airport — a vital link to aid from the outside world, Keen said.

Special Forces airmen hit the ground within hours of the earthquake and had control of the airspace over Port-au-Prince 29 minutes later, he said, adding that the U.S. Air Force controlled up to 180 fixed and rotary wing flights daily during the height of the relief effort before the airspace was handed back to Haitians in early March.

“We knew we had Americans injured,” Keen said. “Probably some severely injured, so we had SOUTHCOM put Coast Guard cutters with aircraft on them to get into range to medevac folks to Guantanamo Bay or the Dominican Republic.”

By first light on Jan. 13, Keen recalled, Coast Guard aircraft were landing in Haiti to evacuate seriously injured U.S. personnel; ships like the USS Carl Vinson and USS Bataan had been ordered to assemble; and the global response force, which included a brigade from the 82nd Airborne Division, was alerted.

“Travel across the city was slow because of rubble and crowds blocking roads,” he said. “Every third building, it seemed, had collapsed or was severely damaged. Streets looked like scenes out of World War II. It became evident to me that this was going to be a tremendous challenge for the international community and for any of us to address the immediate need for support.”

U.N. forces in Port-au-Prince were struggling to find their feet after the collapse of their headquarters with heavy loss of life, Keen said. However, he added, their presence helped stabilize the situation.

“From a point of security, the U.N. troops, with what they had, were in the streets,” he said. “Some of it was trying to look for their own troops or civilians, but I think their presence in the city had an effect. We did not have massive looting or massive violent activities going on in the first few days.”

Keen’s goal, at that stage, was to get as much assistance to Haiti as fast as possible, he said.

“Thousands of lives had already been lost and more needed medical assistance,” he said. “Some of the hospitals were treating people but they were overwhelmed immediately with trauma injuries. Our priorities were saving lives and search and rescue.”

Keen can cite statistics that show U.S. military intervention, which at its height involved the deployment of 22,000 personnel, saved many lives: Search and rescue teams pulled 120 people alive out of the rubble, JTF–Haiti medical staff conducted 90,000 patient encounters and doctors performed more than 800 surgeries on the USNS Comfort hospital ship, he said.

On Jan. 14, Keen visited Port-au-Prince’s University Hospital.

“It was like a little war zone,” he said. “There were people lying out in the street with compound factures and crush injuries. They had run out of anesthetic and they were operating without power and working around the clock.”

The JTF–Haiti commander sent a platoon from the 82nd to the hospital to control the crowds, which, Keen said, have cooperated with soldiers throughout the mission.

“The Haitian people are extremely grateful,” he said. “They will wait in lines all day if they are told what is going to happen and what to expect.”

When the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit arrived in Haiti, the Marines were sent to the town of Leogane, which had been nearly destroyed, he said.

The day after the disaster, Keen sent an engineer to find out what it would take to reopen Port-au-Prince’s badly damaged seaport so that larger quantities of aid could flow in. Two weeks later, with the help of U.S. Army landing craft and engineers, the seaport was receiving cargo. Aid also came overland from San Isidro Air Base in the Dominican Republic, Keen said.

“It was a matter of food and water,” he said. “You had a population of three million people affected and no potable water accessible to them.”

Throughout the relief effort, U.S. forces in Haiti have worked with U.N. troops — which now number 8,000 personnel from 18 nations — whenever possible, Keen said.

The Brazilian commander of U.N. military forces in Haiti, Maj. Gen. Floriano Peixoto Vieira Neto, who was out of the country when the earthquake struck, said he’s been friends with Keen since the pair parachuted together in Brazil in 1984.

“At that time, as captains, we couldn’t have imagined that in the future we would be together executing one of the most important tasks of our lives,” the Brazilian said of Keen, with whom he also worked during a visit to Fort Benning, Ga., in 1988.

“The fact that Lt. Gen. Keen and I have known each other for more than 20 years has affected the results here,” he said, adding that the U.S. military forces are a welcome addition to the U.N. efforts in Haiti.

By last week, Keen’s forces had dwindled to about 3,300 troops on the ground, and his focus had moved to protecting Haitians from floods and mudslides expected next month when monsoon rains are due to arrive. JTF–Haiti staff said their commander’s goal is zero deaths from floods and mudslides.

In the past two months Keen has left Haiti once — to attend the funeral of one of his officers who was killed in a hotel collapse during the earthquake.

“I’ll leave when the JTF mission is over,” he said.

Nuncio of Haiti

Nuncio of Haiti
14-January-2010 -- Catholic News Agency
Nuncio to Haiti Gives First-hand Account of Destruction
Port au Prince, Haiti, Jan 13, 2010 (CNA).-
Speaking with the Vatican's Fides news agency, the Apostolic Nuncio to Haiti, Archbishop Bernardito Auza, described the devastation in the streets of the capital Port-au-Prince. He reported on what he had observed of the situation of religious and government officials in the area and described widespread destruction.
Archbishop Auza stated his observations of the situation in the capital to Fides, saying, "Port-au-Prince is totally devastated. The cathedral, the archbishop's office, all of the big churches, all of the seminaries have been reduced to rubble."
The nuncio said that the resident priest at that cathedral had informed him of the likely death of Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot as he was buried under rubble along with hundreds of priests and seminarians. Other news reports confirmed that the archbishop did pass away in the earthquake.
Auza reported that many government buildings had been razed. All of the Ministry buildings but one were on the ground, as were the Presidential Palace and the schools.
"Parliament with the Senators, the schools with the children, the supermarkets were reduced to nothing," the nuncio stated.
The nuncio had made his way across the city to see the Haitian President and "express his condolences and solidarity" and found that, because they had been outdoors, he and his family had been saved although their home had crumbled.
People who live in front of the collapsed U.N. headquarters had reported to Auza that the head of that mission, Hedi Annabi, was trapped inside with hundreds of others.
The nuncio said that he had returned to his residence later in the morning to find "Priests and Sisters in the street, no longer with homes. The Rector of the seminary saved himself, as did the Dean of studies, but the seminarians are under the rubble. You hear yells everywhere from underneath the rubble."
"The CIFOR (according to Fides, an institute of study for religious men and women) collapsed with students inside that were participating in a conference. The office of the nuncio resisted (the earthquake), there was no one injured, but all of us are in shock!" he said.
"So many things were broken, including the tabernacle, but we are more fortunate than others. Many relatives of the personnel are dead, their houses destroyed. Everyone is asking for help. We will have a problem with water and food before long. We cannot go inside and stay there for very long because the ground continues to shake, so we're camping out in the yard."


Nuncio in Haiti reports needs of country's seminarians

Related articles:
Eucharistic celebration with bishops, seminarians and novices
Vespers Address to Priests, Seminarians, and Deacons at Notre Dame
Celebration of Vespers With Priests, Men and Women Religious, Seminarians and Ecclesial Movements: Homily of His Holiness Benedict XVI
Of Human Life - By Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

Rome, Italy, Feb 26, 2010 / 02:54 pm (CNA).-

The Apostolic Nuncio to Haiti, Archbishop Bernardito Auza, sent a report to the Pontifical Mission Societies this week describing the situation facing seminarians in the devastated country. He explained that the seminarians have “lost everything," adding that "putting them back to ‘normal’ life is a priority.”

According to the Fides News Agency, the archbishop said that, “The greatest needs of the seminarians are clothing, toiletries, tents to sleep in. Many of the seminarians have been sent back to their dioceses, but their dioceses are also extremely poor and in great need of assistance.

The archbishop went on to note that although some books from the library were saved, “We need to purchase Bibles and fundamental texts (Vatican II, Catechism of the Catholic Church etc.) The ones they had were all lost in the rubble.”

“The easiest, most flexible and fastest way to help these unfortunate seminarians is through financial aid that we can use according to the most urgent needs of the moment,” he added.

“Thank you also for your efforts in favor of our traumatized seminarians. We believe that putting the seminarians back to 'normal' life is a priority."

Fides reports that 15 seminarians, one professor and some staff members were killed by the January 12 earthquake.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

ACT Situation Report: Haiti Earthquake 17 Mar 2010

ACT Situation Report: Haiti Earthquake 17 Mar 2010 11:51:00 GMT
Source: Action by Churches Together (ACT) - Switzerland
Elisabeth Gouel
Website: http://www.act-intl.org
Reuters and AlertNet are not responsible for the content of this article or for any external internet sites. The views expressed are the author's alone.

Sitrep

Haiti - No 09/2010

Geneva, March 5, 2010

General situation: (OCHA)

The Government and humanitarian actors are coordinating to determine the scale of humanitarian needs in Nippes and Sud departments following floods on 27 February.

President Ren� Pr�val flew to the affected areas on 4 March in order to survey the damage. Priority needs following the earthquake of 12 January continue to be emergency shelter, site management, sanitation and food.

WFP and its partners will start its surge operation of general food distributions on 5 March.

The operation will target 1.9 million beneficiaries with a two week ration of rice and a one month ration of beans, corn-soy-blend, oil and salt.

Protection monitoring teams are visiting an average of eight displacement sites per day. Around 300 experts from Haiti and abroad have been working in Port-au-Prince on the Post Disaster Needs Assessment and Recovery Framework (PDNA).

The Clinton Foundation has donated, through the logistics cluster, 40 International (Penske) trucks of 10-15 metric tons capacity for inter-agency use. Another 140 smaller 1.5 - 2.5 metric ton vehicles were also donated and will be registered and insured by WFP for use by organizations with mid- to long-term projects in Haiti, as well as by government partners.

Information on the ACT Coordination:

- Carlos Rauda will cut short his mission as Rapid Support Team coordinator and leave Haiti on 7 March for Chile. A big thank you to all RST members who joined the team. NCA, as manager of the RST system, will be asked to help with an evaluation of the RST experience. An easy-to-administer questionnaire will be prepared and sent to members shortly.

- ACT Alliance is in discussion with candidates for coordination and communication team. A part time security advisor, Mr Guito Clervil, has started his work. The composition of the team will be discussed at the next phone call with members. Phone call is proposed to take place on Tuesday 9 March (please come forward with proposals for agenda).

- ACT General Secretary John Nduna is expected to arrive in Haiti on 7 March. A programme was prepared and circulated to the members. John will meet members, partners, church leaders, members of the Haitian Government and bi-lateral and multi-lateral donors. A communicator and a photographer will accompany him and send stories and pictures.

Information by sectors:

Communication: more stories have been produced by Emily Sollies (text) and Jonathan (pictures).

Psychosocial: Church of Sweden psychosocial and staff care is on-going.

Quality and Accountability: The HAP and Sphere support mission to ACT members in Haiti is concluded. As discussed, support will continue, possibly under the larger umbrella of NGO coordination support office.

The team provided a debrief in Geneva on 4 March. A report on the initial findings of the mission has been shared and a final report will be sent. The lessons are:

- the mission was positive as a support for members to check on the needs of members to integrate quality and accountability aspects in the planning and implementation. However, the timing of this mission was not optimal, since members had been busy with appeal preparation and were overstretched. The capacity of members and partners to be accountable to the affected population has been found wanting. There is need to work on providing quality services and to introduce feedback and complaint mechanisms for the population.

A plan on quality and accountability was developed and sent to the ACT Alliance. The institutional set-up for the support is still under discussion.

Specific Reports from ACT Members and Partners

Church World Service

Service Chretien d'Haiti (SCH) Monitors continue to provide psychosocial services to People with Disabilities (PWD) in the six areas around PaP. Monitors are registering/documenting cases in those areas. Monitors have been also supported by the CoS psychosocial team.

CWS and SCH continue to attend the sub-cluster meeting of Injury, Rehabilitation and Disability (IRD) in coordination with GoH ministry office.

CWS has delivered two Finn Ch Aid school tents to be used in the PWD program in coordination with CBM and Handicap International.

SCH guest house: House manager has been contracted and, with SCH staff,is getting guest house ready for ACT members this week. CWS has provided hygiene and baby kits and medicine boxes to NCA, CAID and LWF for distribution. More kits on the way for ACT members.

CWS partners and monitors have participated in the two HAP/Sphere workshops provided to ACT members.

CRWRC

An additional 200 households in Masson have been surveyed and data entered onto spreadsheets.

Distribution lists for food distribution have been prepared for distribution on Tuesday (9th March).

WASH activities for the town of Masson continue. Because of the high water table, the plan for emergency earthen latrine pits will have to be altered to include septic tanks and construction of these emergency pits. Latrines will take longer than expected to install. Well contractors to visit Masson this week so that wells for potable water may be drilled asap.

The Masson community development team leader has been active in the distributions along with the Masson CBO. He will also be attending the psychosocial workshop offered by ACT.

CRWRC staff met community leaders in order to gain information re temporary housing option decision. They have also been debriefed re the tarp distribution and are now planning the food distribution.

Prices and suggestions re temporary shelter have been collected for a decision regarding temporary shelter for households in Masson.

Hygiene and kitchen kits as well as rubble tool prices have been acquired and final decisions re these items will be made this coming week.

A plan for house inspections in Masson has been formulated and is planned to take place in the next couple of weeks.

Repairs to the ICTA school near Masson have begun - it is the future CRWRC relief office site.

Lutheran World Federation - World Service LWF Haiti Activity Report - 21 February to 5 March

The LWF Haiti program is continuing to provide daily drinking water to displaced settlements of Nerett and Saint Therese in P�tion-Ville. An assessment on water, sanitation and public hygiene has also been conducted in L�og�ne and Petit Goave. With the rains arriving, a focus on hygiene and sanitation is increasingly important.

Many activities have been carried out in the psychosocial sector. Two psychosocial assessments have been carried out in the operational areas of Gressier, L�og�ne, Grand Goave and Petit Goave. Four trainings were carried out with the two psychosocial assessment teams. A training was also conducted for 60 teachers who were looking for support in returning to school and relating to children after the earthquake - specifically dealing with how to address questions and fears about the earthquake. The psychosocial support assessment questionnaire has been finalized and translated into French and Creole. A recreation trip took place with national LWF staff to a nearby beach where psychosocial discussions took place regarding experiences during and after the earthquake, stress and reactions. Two psychosocial officers were recruited and began their LWF contracts with a psychosocial training on Thursday March 4.

An MOU has just been signed with a local partner organization RNDDH (R�seau National de D�fense des Droits Humains) who are currently carrying out assessments in the area that LWF will be establishing a new office base - L�og�ne. This implementing partner is currently identifying families who will benefit from the distribution of food and non food items planned for the week of March 15. These distributions will take place in Gressier, L�og�ne, Grand Goave and Petit Goave.

LWF Haiti is otherwise moving forward with the implementation of the ACT Appeal through identifying land for an office in L�og�ne, calling for tenders for NFIs to be distributed, and arrangements for transportation of said items upon procurement.

Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe (DKH)

DKH continued its distribution of relief good in Jacmel and Bainet. As of February 28, DKH has provided kits to 4950 people. Distribution roll out for another 560 families (about 3600 - 4000 people) is planned until March 9. The kits include: one tent, two sleeping mats, two blankets, one mosquito net, one balti, one dish to wash cloths and one dish for personal use.

Please refer to previous sitreps for more information on the entire ACT Response, as well as the ACT Appeal HTI101.

Any funding indication or pledge should be communicated to Jessie Kgoroeadira, ACT Chief Finance Officer (jkg@actalliance.org).

(ends)

ACT Alliance - Action by Churches Together - is a global alliance of churches and related agencies working together for positive and sustainable change in the lives of people affected by emergencies, poverty and injustice through coordinated and effective humanitarian, development and advocacy work.

[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]

Saturday, March 20, 2010

HaitiEngineering.org Front Page Post





We are within weeks of our trip to Haiti. We have made tremendous strides in putting together a nonprofit engineering organization that is devoted to helping the Haitian people address their infrastructure needs.

As noted in our previous post, word is spreading about our efforts and we find ourselves in no short supply of talented professionals willing to lend their time and expertise.

We would like to welcome several new team members on board.

- Louis Gary Lissade, Attorney and CEO - Cabinet Lissade, Former Haiti Minister of Justice, will represent Haiti Engineering, INC, who was just recently in the news worldwide for representing American missionaries jailed in Haiti. He is a well respected lawyer throughout the world.

- Steve Price, PE, A Professional Engineer in the State of California. He is currently the Deputy District Director of Maintenance and Operations in District 5 for the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). Mr. Price is responsible for the Maintenance and Operations of the California State Highway system in the Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Monterey, San Benito and Santa Cruz counties.

- James Lawrence, PE - Environmental Resources Engineer. Mr. Lawrence is
currently working as Fuel Manager for the California Department of Transportation. Mr. Lawrence will be our Database Specialist.

- Sonny Fong, (Special Advisor to Haiti Engineering) Emergency Preparedness and Security Manager, Construction Management, Emergency Management, currently working for the California Department of Water Resources.

- Derial W. Bivens, CEMP, COML
Certified Emergency Management Professional
FEMA Certified Communications Unit Leader, Level III, Senior Partner with Shaw/Bivens EM Consulting of Beloit, WI.

Haiti is inundated with non government organizations (NGO’s) that are addressing the hunger issue in Haiti. It is our goal to not follow the framework set up by most of those NGO’s. It is not sustainable and indebts the Haitian people to those organizations for generations to come, without any true solutions to the problem. Will those same NGO’s be there feeding the people a hundred years from now, or do they have plans to help the Haitian people be self sufficient in time?

There’s a Confucius proverb that says “Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day .. teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime” This is the approach that Haiti Engineering, INC (HE) hopes to foster, a collaborative environment where both parties , HE and Haitian Engineers and Architects, work together to address the infrastructure problems in Haiti.

In closing, we’ve been asked if the lessons learned in creating HE be applied to other areas around the world that may face similar challenges due to natural disasters and would HE be willing to help in other parts of the world? The answer to both questions is yes. If we continue to find dedicated professionals willing to help, then expanding our efforts beyond Haiti would be a natural progression. HE’s logo says “ It’s one world, Let’s build it together!” - how true a statement if we go beyond Haiti’s borders, and what a legacy to the 300,000 plus that have died in Haiti from the January 2010 earthquake, then an engineering nonprofit organization dedicated to responding to disasters worldwide.


~Haiti Engineering STAFF~

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Léogâne
Léogâne
Leyogàn


Léogâne
Location in Haiti
Coordinates: 18°30′39″N 72°38′2″W18.51083°N 72.63389°W

Country Haiti

Department
Ouest

Arrondissement
Léogâne

Léogâne (Haitian Creole: Leyogàn) is a coastal city in Ouest Department, Haïti. It is located in the eponymous arrondissement, the Léogâne Arrondissement. The port town is located about 29 km (18 miles) West of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. Léogâne is the birthplace of the Taíno queen Anacaona (the town was originally called the Amerindian name Yaguana and the city's name is a corruption of that) as well as Marie-Claire Heureuse Félicité, the wife of the Haitian revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1758), and Simone Duvalier, the First Lady of Haiti.
In 2010, Léogâne was at the epicenter of the January 12 earthquake, and was catastrophically affected, with 80-90% of buildings damaged. [1][2] It also had been destroyed in an earthquake in 1770.[3]
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Charlemagne Péralte
• 2 Facilities
• 3 2010 earthquake
• 4 References
o 4.1 Citations
• 5 See also

Charlemagne Péralte
Charlemagne Péralte, the leader of the Haitian resistance to the U.S. occupation that had started in 1915, had been a military officer stationed in Léogâne. He resigned from the military, refusing to surrender to the U.S. troops without a fight. Afterwards he returned to his native town of Hinche and began leading the Cacos against the occupation forces.
Facilities
Prior to the 12 January 2010 earthquake the city had a nursing school. There was also an old hospital, Sainte-Croix (Holy Cross), but it had closed two years previously.[4][5] The centerpiece of the city was the Sainte Rose de Lima School.[6]
2010 earthquake
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Léogâne in 2010

Further information: 2010 Haiti earthquake


Damage to Leogane on January 22


A LCU from the 22nd MEU delivers humanitarian aid and supplies to the beach at Léogâne.
Léogâne was at the epicenter of the 7.0 magnitude 12 January 2010 earthquake,[1] and a United Nations assessment team that investigated three main towns near Port-au-Prince found that Léogâne was "the worst affected area" with 80 to 90% of buildings damaged and no remaining government infrastructure.[2] Nearly every concrete structure was destroyed. The damage was also reported to be worse than the capital. The military estimated that 20,000 to 30,000 people had died from the earthquake in Léogâne. People have congregated in ad hoc squatter camps and relief has taken longer to reach Léogâne.[1]
In the wake of the tremblor destroying municipal buildings, city hall was moved to a telecommunications building.[7] Among the facilities destroyed in the quake was the Sainte Rose de Lima School, considered the emotional heart of the city. The main commercial strip, the "Grand Rue" was also collapsed.[6] Saint Croix Hospital was also partially demolished.[8] The "court of the peace" building was destroyed in the tremblor.[9]
British urban search and rescue teams with Rapid-UK along with the Icelandic search and rescue team were the first to reach the destroyed town on January 17, 2010.[10] The Canadian destroyer HMCS Athabaskan first reached the area on Tuesday, January 19. The Athabaskan's crew of 280 have been tasked to supply humanitarian aid to the city and assist in relief efforts.[11] A Japanese field hospital, Sri Lankan peacekeeper unit, and an Argentine White Helmets field hospital are already in the field treating survivors,[12] the Japanese and Argentinians had arrived on the 18th.[6] The Canadian Medical Assistance Team (CMAT) arrived on the 19th, and set to work performing surgeries.[13][14]
The NGO's Heart to Heart International and Médecins Sans Frontières are providing medical aid at clinical sites in the area.
As Léogâne has no airport, the Canadians began using the small strip at Jacmel to avoid the bottleneck in Port au Prince, and had 250-300 personnel there the next day.[15] The Canadian 1 Field Hospital is being deployed to Léogâne.[16] The Cuban military set up a field hospital in the region.[17]
Canadian soldiers are providing security for food distribution points.[18] The Canadian medical facility is located near the Japanese field hospital, which is next to the nursing school, which has been turned into a hospital.[4] Canada has deployed the Van Doos, a Canadian infantry regiment, to help with recovery efforts.[19] Haitian Girl Guides and Boy Scouts are providing crowd control at some food distribution points.[7]
With no airport in Léogâne, any aid needing to be airlifted in needs to be carried by helicopter, or through use of small planes on makeshift landing strips. The highway, Route 9, at Léogâne, has been cordoned off by UN Peacekeepers to use as such a landing strip.[20]
The Korean government has announced it will deploy 250 peacekeepers to the region in February, composed mostly of engineers, with some medical troops, and marines for security.[21] The mission comprises 120 military engineers, 22 medics and a 1,200 tonne-freighter filled with supplies and equipment.[22]
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has started a cash-for-work programme to clear irrigation canals in the Léogâne area.[23]
As of 9 February 2010, the US 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit is rotating out of Haiti, having been replaced by the US 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, in their position on USS Bataan and Carrefour, Leogane and Petit-Goave, Grand-Goave.[24][25]
As of 18 February 2010, the Korean Peacekeepers have started work on building a hospital.[26]
On 27 February 2010, 190 South Korean Peacekeepers left home for deployment in Leogane.[27]
On 28 February 2010, the 240-member contingent of South Korean Peacekeepers (Task Force Danbi / Operation Danbi) has arrived.[28]
On 2 March 2010, the IFRC decongested a refugee camp, creating a second one out of the overflow.[29]
On 7 March 2010, it was announced that HMCS Athabaskan would end its mission on 10th March.[30][31]

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Haiti: Third World Disater Capitalism

Haiti: Third World Disater Capitalism
Friday, 12 March 2010.

The expression "from bad to worse" hardly does justice to the damage done by the earthquake in Haiti

Chile was hit by a massive 8.8 earthquake on 27 February, as Shehui Zhuyi Zhe was going to print. This was the world's sixth-strongest earthquake since 1900. With early reports of at least 300 killed and massive damage to buildings and roads, the government declared a "state of catastrophe". Chile's was the second major earthquake in the region in two months, following the earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January. Despite being a less powerful 7-magnitude quake, some 220,000 people are now believed to have perished in Haiti, with a deadly combination of poverty, already broken infrastructure, and social collapse even before the earthquake worsening the disaster. This article analyses the impact of imperialist domination and neo-liberal policies upon the people of Haiti before and after the quake.

Will Soto Socialist Alternative (CWI US Section)

Millions around the world cannot help but feel horror and sympathy when they read such headlines as "Bodies on the Streets in Port-au-Prince," "Smoke Rising Over Port-au-Prince," "Haitians Struggle Over Relief Supplies," or "Police in Port-au-Prince Shoot Suspected Criminals." But had they been paying attention, the news services of the world could have carried any of those headlines during most weeks before the January 12th earthquake. The recent earthquake has hit the poorest metropolitan area in the Americas and brought a new wave of devastation to a country that had already suffered the worst effects of capitalism, poverty and imperial meddling.

The expression "from bad to worse" hardly does justice to the damage done by the earthquake in Haiti. While there have always been religious fanatics declaring the end of days, millions of sane people in Haiti cannot help but acknowledge that the present destruction and suffering is of almost biblical proportions.

Nevertheless, the scale of the destruction and the huge number of casualties cannot be simply chalked up to an ‘act of god.' The severe crowding of Port au Prince's slums, the slapdash construction of so many of Haiti's homes and businesses, and the nonexistent emergency services and public infrastructure are all to blame for the awful extent of the damage and loss of life. Many observers have already pointed out that the World Series Earthquake that hit San Francisco in 1989 was at nearly the same level on the Richter scale yet it killed only 67 people. Death counts from the Haiti quake have already climbed above 100,000. Without a doubt, the humanitarian catastrophe that has followed the recent earthquake must be understood as the man-made outgrowth of Haiti's neo-liberal social order long propped up by the predatory ruling class, the U.S. state and more recently by the occupying U.N. forces.

A Brutally Unequal Society

A natural disaster this powerful has no respect for persons. While the earthquake brought havoc to the poorest slum districts of Port-au-Prince, Leogane, Jacmel and other towns, it did not spare some wealthy and powerful Haitians in large homes, government offices or supermarkets. The quake trapped and killed some foreigners in the capital's plushest hotel. It killed the archbishop and it killed the leader of the U.N. mission. In contrast to the relatively powerless and unpopular president René Preval, the head of the UN Stabilization Mission or MINUSTAH, was probably the most powerful political authority on the island.

But as the dust settled, it became clear that the economic and political order had re-emerged much the same. Many of the mansions and upscale stores in Petionville and other more exclusive neighborhoods were relatively unharmed by the quake. As government assistance and millions of dollars of generous private donations started streaming their way towards Haiti, there can be no doubt that the country's tiny elite of industrialists, importers, and political powerbrokers were preparing to carve up the spoils among themselves.

Capitalists are people too. Like others, they feel sympathy for the victims of a natural disaster. But what they cannot do is stop the suffering that their profit system inevitably creates every single day.

Companies that have been profiting off of Haiti for decades have loosened up for a while. Western Union temporarily suspended the fees for sending money to Haiti. T-Mobile has allowed free calls to Haiti until the end of January. But how long will the profit hiatus last? When the dust settles, all of the big banks, importers, UN officials, NGOs, remittance agencies, tourist enclaves and telecom companies can almost surely be expected to go back to business as usual - which for Haiti means acute poverty for nearly everybody and comfortable profits for a very few.

A History of Colonialism and Imperial Meddling

The media images coming from Haiti are repetitive and awful: poor, injured Haitians receiving assistance from foreign aid workers and scrambling for relief supplies.

None can help but appreciate the magnitude of the present catastrophe. But at worst, the media coverage can amount to a kind of pornography of pain, and it fits into a conventional picture of Haiti as a prostrate nation, the archetypical case of third world poverty, and a helpless economic basketcase.

Most Haitians would be proud to tell you that the country was not always this way. Haiti was founded following a long period of slave revolutions and civil wars that lasted from 1791-1804. Unlike the innumerable slave conspiracies and rebellions that went down in defeat, the slave rebels of Haiti effectively abolished slavery and kicked out successive waves of European colonial authorities. Built on the ashes of the colonial plantation system, independent Haiti was surrounded by hostile powers and beset by continuing cycles of civil war and popular rebellion. Independent Haiti was ruled by shaky despotic regimes that were vulnerable to threats and extortion by foreign powers. The most notable example was the French state who repeatedly threatened to reconquer Haiti and who forced the Haitian state to pay an indemnity of 150 million Francs in 1825.

But for more than 100 years, from independence in 1804 through the beginning of the first U.S. occupation in 1915, while much of the New World was governed by colonialists, slave owners, and their institutional successors, Haiti maintained its territorial independence and contributed to slave emancipation and anticolonial rebellions in the region. Throughout the 19th century, former plantation lands were divided up and much of Haiti's population became independent peasants. Most of Haiti's people were relatively poor and the country was beset by political conflict and dictatorships, but, unlike today, the country produced its own food and did not have to depend on remittances, charity and foreign debt.

The international media have always been good at portraying how poor Haiti is. Few can forget how much press attention the country received in 2008 when financial speculators sent food prices skyrocketing and some Haitians were found selling mud cakes meant to hold off hunger. Some joke that Haiti is the only country in the world with a last name: "Haiti, The Poorest Country in the Western Hemisphere." What few in the media or elsewhere understand is how Haiti came to be so poor and crisis-ridden.

During much of the 19th century, on the basis of widely distributed rural subsistence production, Haiti's life expectancy climbed well above the dismal levels experienced during slavery and may have risen higher than the current figure which stands at just 60. Haiti's 20th century history was characterized by its neo-colonial relationship with the U.S. In 1915, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, the famous defender of the rights of small nations, ordered the Marines to occupy Haiti. The U.S. controlled the country from 1915-1934, and the U.S. military crushed an armed Haitian uprising known as the Caco Rebellion. Encouraged by increasingly profitable U.S. investments elsewhere in Latin America, U.S. military officials and private businessmen tried to invest in Haitian agriculture. Whereas all 19th century Haitian constitutions forbade foreigners from owning land in Haiti, the 1918 constitution overturned this restriction. Former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt was serving as undersecretary of the Navy in Haiti during the U.S. occupation. He considered investing there and he later claimed that he had personally written the Haitian constitution of 1918.

For nearly the last 100 years, the U.S. has played a dominant role in the politics and economic life of Haiti. The U.S. largely backed the dictatorship of Papa Doc Duvalier and his son Baby Doc. The U.S. intervened diplomatically and militarily during the revolutionary movements and political crises of the 1980s and 1990s. And it was most recently the United States who forcibly removed populist president Jean Bertrand Aristide in 2004 and orchestrated the creation of the U.N. political authority that has ruled there since. As Haiti has sunk deeper and deeper into poverty and crisis, millions of its citizens have migrated to Canada, France, and above all the United States, and a shocking one third of the nation's GDP now comes from remittances. Aside from reserves of oil, uranium and other mineral wealth, as well as the largely unrealized potential for a tourist industry, many economists point out that Haiti's only real resource is cheap labor - whether exploited as immigrant labor abroad or exploited in Haiti by the light assembly sweatshops that began springing up in the 1970s.

One Negative Image After Another

Conservative Christian and prominent televangelist Pat Robertson has made news by claiming that Haiti's revolution of 1791-1804 was the product of a "pact with the devil" that has since condemned them to poverty and hardship of which the January earthquake was merely the latest example. Besides the fact that Robertson's lunacy actually strikes a chord with the growing evangelical movement that has prospered amidst the political letdowns and economic despair of recent Haitian history, it is an indication of the kind of racism and nuttiness that passes for wisdom among right-wing pundits and religious fanatics.

But the Christian Right are not the only people with more or less racist assumptions about the situation in Haiti. The U.S. media and the U.S. government have repeatedly expressed somewhat bogus concerns about "security" and "violence." Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat has observed that the media almost assumes that a huge collection of black people represent an inevitable promise of "violence" or "looting." As they did in the aftermath of Katrina, U.S. news media have again shown their tendency to label black disaster survivors as ‘looters.' In reality the quake aftermath in Haiti has been relatively peaceful. Rather than rob and pillage, millions of Haitians have struggled to rescue friends, family members, neighbors and strangers.

Around the world, people have correctly criticized the militarized the nature of U.S. aid efforts. Thousands of marines were rushed in up front, while foreign relief supplies have taken weeks to reach some suffering quake survivors. The disaster has not erased the fact that Haiti is still seen as a neo-colonial zone of influence both by traditional imperial powers and recent upstarts. Chinese rescue crews were quick to symbolically plant a flag upon their arrival. Much of the UN occupying forces have been made up of Brazilian troops, sent in part to bolster Brazil's economic and political prestige in the Latin American region.

Much has been made of the destruction of Haiti's National Penitentiary and the escape of some thousands of inmates. However, the recent reports and videos of summary police shootings are almost taken to be business as usual in a country that has long known extreme repression from paramilitary death squads, police, and foreign troops under U.N. auspices. Although some hardened, dangerous criminals probably did escape from the collapsed prison, many of the people contained in the hot, overcrowded, dangerous facility were petty offenders, recent deportees, or victims of Haiti's notoriously unjust and disorganized judicial system.

Haiti and Migrants' Rights

For many decades, Haitians have been desperately compelled to leave their country. Already the crisis has apparently driven an increased flow of refugees to the Dominican border and it remains to be seen how the earthquake and its aftermath will influence Haitians' migration attempts. Apparently the U.S. has already begun preparing the Guantánamo naval base for a potential mass migration of boat-people as they did when thousands of Haitians took to the seas to flee the right-wing dictatorships of the early 1990s.

Soon after the quake, the U.S. suspended deportations to Haiti. The U.S. and many other countries have been accepting some orphans and injured Haitians for medical care. All of this is good, but it raises the question of when these exceptional measures will be stopped. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the U.S. immigration process became more difficult and costly. With the recession, and the recent increase in government raids and no-match letters, immigrants in general and Haitians in particular have had a hard time finding political asylum, visas, and work in the U.S. The president of the West African nation of Senegal recently made a bold offer to accept Haitian refugees and offer them land in his country. And while not many Haitians are likely to leave one under-developed country for another, the welcoming openness of a comparatively poor country only highlights the restrictive immigration policies of the rich countries.

Restitution Not Charity

The mountains of cash donated by hardworking people around the world to help the survivors in Haiti stand as one more piece of evidence to prove that humans are not inherently selfish or greedy. If charity or good will were enough to resolve economic and political disasters, Haiti may never have been so poor in the first place. Haiti was not only one of the world's poorest countries, it is also has more NGOs than almost any other country. While this may be evidence that NGOs are inherently benevolent organizations who flock to the poorest countries, it also suggests that NGOs are hardly capable of resolving the crises of third world capitalism.

While the representatives of big imperial powers are willing to offer many kinds of aid, they have no interest in upsetting or redressing the global order which has kept the poorest countries so poor. While millions of dollars of relief money are flowing into Haiti, including a one hundred million dollar loan from the IMF, they can hardly erase the damage done by all of the money that has flowed out of Haiti in the form of indemnity and debt payments made to the rich countries over the last two centuries.

In 2003, Aristide's government hired some actuaries to calculate the interest on the $150 million gold francs that Haiti was forced to pay to France in 1825. The figure came out to roughly $21 billion. Shortly before he was forcibly removed by the U.S. in 2004, President Aristide's government sent France a bill for that amount. Surprisingly enough, the bill has yet to be paid, but many Haitians take that amount as a starting point from which to consider the historic debt that the former slave holding, imperial powers owe to their country.

Today, more than ever, a workers' and poor people's mass alternative has to be constructed in opposition to the tiny rich elite. The current earthquake disaster and likely character of the ‘reconstruction program' under the auspices of the rotten ruling elite and regional capitalist powers will highlight to the Haitian masses the need for democratic control of the resources in society. On the basis of capitalism, the vast majority of people will remain impoverished, jobless, illiterate and hungry and living in shantytowns or in the countryside, without electricity. This barely subsistence existence means that the mass of people are highly vulnerable to ‘natural disasters' such as the recent earthquake.

Workers and poor need their own independent class organizations - unions and a mass party - a socialist alternative that would fight for real fundamental change, making an appeal to the working class and poor across the Caribbean and the whole of the Americas.
To respond to the earthquake emergency, the CWI calls for:

Immediate massive funding for earthquake disaster relief and reconstruction
Democratic control over all aid and emergency; rescue, relief and rehabilitation of the affected people; and massive reconstruction programs, through elected committees of workers, land laborers and poor people in every area
Build good quality housing, hospitals, schools, roads and infrastructure, and other vital public resources and services
The cancellation of all foreign debts

The CWI Says:

End unjust trade policies and the imposed policies of the World Bank and IMF
State subsidies for struggling small farmers
Jobs and a living wage for all
Properly funded education and public health service
Bring the resources and main planks of the economy into public ownership, under democratic workers' control and management
UN forces out of Haiti - end imperialist meddling
Build a new mass party of the working class and poor, with socialist policies
For a socialist Haiti, with a democratically-run planned economy, under the control and management of working people, as part of a voluntary and equal socialist federation of the Caribbean
If you want to order Shehui Zhuyi Zhe (社会主义者) magazine, which includes other articles on women's struggle, the case of Liu Xiaobo and repression in China, Hong Kong's de facto referendum and fight for democracy, organising students, Haiti, and the enduring crisis of global capitalism, mail your order (HK$25 or €2.5) to cwi.china@gmail.com

Thursday, March 11, 2010

U.S. engineers train Haitians to assess building damage

Mar 1, 2010

By By Sgt. Richard Andrade


Related Links
Haiti Earthquake Relief Mission
TOURGEAU, Haiti (Feb. 28, 2010) -- The Naval Facilities Engineering Command partnered with Army engineers, Navy Seebees, engineers from the Air Force, Feb. 26, to train Haitian engineers on building assessment, to ensure Haitian citizens are living in structurally-sound buildings.

“The work we are doing today is to systematically walk through neighborhoods assessing damage,” said Vince Sobach, a NAVFAC Joint Task Force Engineer. “The primary goal is to get people back in their homes. The second part of the mission is training the local Haitian engineers. Basically we are doing a technology transfer. We are trying to both things at the same time, since time is of the essence.”

Sobach explained that many of the residents of Tourgeau are in one of the local internally displaced persons’ camp that is very much overcrowded. He said it is essential that the camp is decompressed.

“The goal today is to evaluate all the houses and structures in the neighborhood of Tourgeau for earthquake damage and get people back to safe houses or tell them if they are living in a dangerous one,” said Bryan Haelsig, a NAVFAC engineer.

The group of engineers walked from house to house knocking on doors, looking in and around buildings and talking to residents. All of the Haitian citizens opened their doors with no protests and confidently showed the cracks on the walls of their homes.

“We are here to do the assessments for two reasons,” said U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Scott A. Shaulis. “According to a United Nations poll, it is estimated that the people living in the large displaced persons’ camp near the palace, about 85 percent of them are from Tourgeau. If we find that their homes have little to no damage from the earthquake,” Shaulis said, “it is hoped that they will come home and alleviate the strain on that camp.”

The long term goal, said Shaulis, “is to compile all the information that we are gathering, give it to the Haitian government and they will decide what to do from there.”

Shaulis said, “This is a good and noble effort to come in and tell them ‘you can feel safe going back in to that building.’”

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

FEMA Personnel And Rescue Teams Honored By President Obama For Support Of Haiti

Release Date: March 10, 2010
Release Number: HQ-10-037

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) personnel and members of FEMA-trained Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) teams from California, Florida, New York, and Virginia today joined other personnel and teams involved in the United States response to Haiti for a Rose Garden ceremony with President Obama. The President thanked all who participated in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)-led effort.

Under the direction of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), FEMA communications personnel from Incident Management Assistance Teams (IMAT), and a Mobile Emergency Response Support (MERS) team, as well as support from FEMA external affairs, were activated to support the Haiti response. In addition, USAR teams totaling more than 500 personnel deployed to the country. These teams included the California Task Force 2 from the Los Angeles County Fire Department, Florida Task Force 1 from the Miami-Dade Fire and Rescue Department, Florida Task Force 2 from the City of Miami Fire Department, New York Task Force 1 from the New York City Office of Emergency Management, Virginia Task Force 1 from the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department, and Virginia Task Force 2 from the Virginia Beach Fire Department. The teams joined an international effort of more than 40 search and rescue teams that rescued at least 135 individuals.

Click Here to watch a video of Administrator Fugate and Dr. Rajiv Shah, Administrator of USAID, touring the USAR Command Post at the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, Haiti with Chief Dave Downey of the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department.

FEMA has cooperative agreements with 28 USAR teams throughout the country, including international teams that have direct cooperative agreements with USAID. A USAR team is made up of about 72 multi-faceted, cross-trained personnel who serve in six major functional areas, including search, rescue, medical, hazardous materials, logistics and planning.


Last Modified: Wednesday, 10-Mar-2010 14:13:59

Monday, March 8, 2010

U.S. Warns of Malaria Risk in Haiti

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: March 4, 2010


Seven emergency responders, three Haitian residents now in the United States and one American traveler are known to have caught malaria in Haiti after the Jan. 12 earthquake, United States health officials said Thursday. Malaria is endemic throughout Haiti, so Haitians now living outdoors and relief workers are “at substantial risk for the disease,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Haiti's President Preval goes to Washington

This story is taken from Sacbee / Living Here / Wire Lifestyle News / Wire Lifestyle



Haiti's President Preval goes to Washington
McClatchy Newspapers
Published Saturday, Mar. 06, 2010


WASHINGTON -- Haitian President Rene Preval arrives in Washington Monday for meetings with Congress and President Barack Obama as the White House prepares to ask lawmakers for more than $1 billion in aid for the earthquake-ravaged country.

Preval, though, is likely to also press for more immediate concerns. He told The Miami Herald on Friday that though billions have been pledged, little has gone to the Haitian government.

"There is an urgency. The urgency is that we have entered into a rainy season," he said, noting that the country needs at least $93 million immediately to fix drainage pipes to prevent flooding.

He also wants to purchase seeds and fertilizer to encourage those who fled the wrecked capital of Port-au-Prince to stay in the provinces and farm. The country is also seeking money to get students back in school.

Preval arrives in Washington after meeting with a series of visiting U.S. lawmakers, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and several Latin American leaders. He has been to the neighboring Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Mexico but it will mark his first U.S. trip, post-disaster.

It comes just three weeks before the U.S. and other donor nations meet in New York to map out a way to assist in a reconstruction effort that has been estimated to cost $14 billion.

"What's most important is the philosophy of the reconstruction," Preval said he will tell U.S. officials. "It's not just reconstruct Port-au-Prince. It's rebuild Haiti."

Decades of neglect of the provinces and agriculture, Preval said, have forced people into the overcrowded capital.

"We need to put jobs in the provinces and for that you need roads, electricity, education, health," he said.

His visit comes as administration officials are pulling together an emergency spending package on Haiti reconstruction to present to Congress. As of March 2, the U.S. has spent more than $712 million for relief efforts, including $427 million by the U.S. Agency for International Development and $285 million by the Defense Department.

Aid organizations have pressed the administration to ask for $3 billion for relief and reconstruction efforts in what could be the first step in a decade-long reconstruction effort. Congressional staffers said they expect to see a request for between $1.5 billion to $3 billion.

"The administration needs to send up the largest emergency spending ever for a single nation," said Mark Schneider, a former U.S. AID official who coordinated the U.S. response to Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

"The reality is, the earthquake in Haiti was one of the worst disasters in recorded history and I would hope the response reflects that."

Schneider, now with the International Crisis Group, noted that in past disasters in the hemisphere, including Mitch, the U.S. has provided as much as 60 percent of the reconstruction assistance.

States like Florida are expected to ask for reimbursement for treating injured Haitians and sheltering and schooling refugees. Congressional aides said it's unclear how much of the request will be for reimbursing federal and state agencies and how much will be for new spending.

"In addition to the badly needed assistance for the Haitian relief efforts, any emergency supplemental must reimburse the state and county governments in Florida," for the additional costs, said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, Fla.

Administration officials declined to comment, but Secretary of State Clinton told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday that she expects the spending package to go before Congress "in the next few weeks."

She said it would "include both replenishment of funds in the Defense Department and USAID principally, but also funding for the recovery and reconstruction efforts going forward."

Observers suggest there is a huge well of bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for Haiti - even in a stagnant economy and amid worries over spending bills. But they caution that the administration and Congress need to act quickly before attention wanes.

"There's a genuine sense on the Hill that we need to get something done and get it done right," said Johanna Mendelson Forman, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Interest was evident Thursday as members of a House Financial Services subcommittee quickly approved a bill aimed at easing Haiti's economic situation by pressing lenders to forgive the country's debt and distribute any new aid in the form of grants. The bill will be on the House floor Wednesday. A similar resolution cleared the Senate without opposition Friday.

"Even during our own economic situation, we haven't lost our compassion," said Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala.

Haiti currently owes $1.1 billion to various lending institutions, including the Inter-American Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has already called on the banks to cancel the debt, but treasury's deputy assistant secretary for the western hemisphere, Nancy Lee, told lawmakers that Congress' clout would be "critical."

"We can go to the donors and say, 'This is an idea that's attractive on the Hill,' " Lee told House members.

Thomas Hart of One, a global advocacy campaign founded by the Irish rock star Bono, welcomed the legislation, sponsored by Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., but noted it will "free up very little in the short term for recovery efforts.

"Haiti will need far more long-term development assistance and trade income than debt relief," he told lawmakers. "Debt cancellation is a small but important piece of a complex puzzle."

In an opinion piece for McClatchy Newspapers, including The Miami Herald, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House is awaiting the administration's request for emergency spending and that "Congress is committed to helping Haiti recover from this tragedy.

"We have an urgent responsibility to help provide a foundation for a stable and more prosperous neighbor," she wrote. "Sustained and constructive American leadership is essential in this fight."

And she underscored a consistent refrain among politicians and the donor community that has long seen money go missing in Haiti: "Strong accountability and transparency must rest at the center of this undertaking."

The House has sent three delegations of lawmakers to Haiti to see the damage for themselves.

Despite vehement opposition to recent spending bills, Rep. James Clyburn, D-South Carolina, the Majority Whip whom Pelosi has named her point person on Haiti legislation, predicted a Haiti aid bill would garner 400 votes. He noted private donors have raised nearly $1 billion for Haiti.

"There's absolutely the support," Clyburn said.

(Lesley Clark reported from Washington; Jacqueline Charles reported from Port-Au-Prince, Haiti.)

ShareThis

Buzz up!

As rains approach, a scramble to get latrines and hygiene supplies to Haiti

This story is taken from Sacbee / Living Here / Wire Lifestyle News / Wire Lifestyle



As rains approach, a scramble to get latrines and hygiene supplies to Haiti
Los Angeles Times
Published Sunday, Mar. 07, 2010


PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- When Guerrier Lejean feels nature's call, he creeps to the edge of his urban encampment and relieves himself in the bushes.

He has been doing so since the Jan. 12 earthquake left him homeless, and so have most of his approximately 2,500 neighbors who huddle in shelters made of sticks and bed sheets.

The crowded camp, wedged between an exhaust-choked boulevard and the Port-au-Prince airport, has no bathrooms. Many residents defecate into plastic shopping bags and hurl them into the fetid waters of a channel that runs along the edge of the camp.

"It's not good, but you have no choice," said Lejean, a 53-year-old auto-body repairman. "You can't just relieve yourself right where you live, in front of everyone."

A dire shortage of toilets in the more than 300 encampments that have sprouted willy-nilly across Port-au-Prince has added to the list of daily rigors faced by displaced residents. But it is more than a matter of inconvenience.

With rainy season expected to begin next month, sanitation and hygiene loom as urgent health concerns for about 1 million people living in fields and vacant lots in quake-struck areas in and around the capital.

Former President Bill Clinton, the United Nations' special envoy to Haiti, called sanitation the most pressing need facing quake victims and warned of the dangers, "particularly for little kids."

"They have no place to go to the bathroom and, as a result ... they may be contaminating every piece of standing water," Clinton said in an interview with Fox News' Major Garrett. And that, he said, could lead to diarrhea, dysentery, cholera and tetanus, "and we could have a huge second wave of casualties."

Aid workers say coming rains will increase the risk of disease outbreaks. Authorities are racing to get latrines built and portable toilets and hand-washing stations installed before heavy rains begin.

"Once the rain comes, the feces will flow everywhere," said Therese Dooley, senior adviser for sanitation and hygiene at UNICEF. "A gram of feces contains billions of bacteria and pathogens. What you have to worry about is them getting into the food chain and the mouth."

Haitian officials hope to have in place at least 18,000 latrines, one for about every 50 displaced people, within a few weeks. Authorities want to eventually cut that ratio to one latrine for every 20 people.

Aid groups are digging pits, installing portable toilets and erecting latrines with above-ground storage tanks. Camps are gradually being outfitted with hand-washing stations: 2-liter plastic sacks or 200-liter drums with nozzles and soap.

Relief officials point out that proper hygiene can be an even better at preventing disease than latrines. UNICEF, has handed out hygiene kits with buckets, soap, toothbrushes and sanitary napkins to 86,000 families.

No outbreaks of disease have been reported, but the task has not been easy.

The crush of people in the impromptu urban settlements has left little room for latrines. Many people are bunked down on paved streets and parking lots, making it impossible to dig trenches to serve as makeshift outhouses, as has been done in some bigger camps. And in several places where such outhouses were constructed, early rains caused the walls of the pits to collapse.

Adding to the problems, not everyone knows how to use the facilities. A Haitian work crew building pit latrines on the grounds of a vast golf course-turned-camp was dismayed to find stall after stall soiled by people who did not lift the lids over the floor holes.

"Maybe there's a way to pass the word how to use the toilet," said crew member Samuel Jacques, who has been living in the camp since his house collapsed. He and fellow workers decided that someone should pass through the giant camp with a megaphone to instruct residents.

Aid workers say they are taking a flexible approach to sanitation, tailoring solutions for the conditions. Agencies have rented most of the available portable toilets in the country, about 500, and hope donated units from abroad will bring that number to nearly 6,000. Groups such as Oxfam are scrambling to get 30 more toilet-sanitation trucks shipped in from abroad.

Sanitation specialists are exploring more exotic methods, such as toilets that can separate liquid and solid refuse. In the short term, plastic bags may have to suffice in certain places - but with a more reliable system for collection, said Nicholas Brooks, an Oxfam sanitation and hygiene specialist.

Longer-term answers will hinge on emerging plans for where to resettle people.

Experts point out that Haiti already was sorely in need of sanitation; fewer than a third of Port-au-Prince's residents had proper toilets before the earthquake. Many people relied on public bathrooms in their neighborhoods or relieved themselves in plastic bags and tossed them in a hole.

"You're already playing catch-up," Dooley said. "Even before the earthquake, there was a sanitation emergency."

For the displaced, the lack of toilets and sinks is another unhappy reminder of how little control they have over their lives, even as emergency supplies of food and water have grown more reliable.

In the encampment where Lejean was playing checkers with a friend, people filled buckets from a pair of giant plastic water tanks. Many residents now list a toilet - any form of toilet - as one of their two top needs, along with more permanent shelters.

"Circumstances caused us to live here," said Lejean's friend, 28-year-old Gaulthier Herbert. "Nobody wanted to live out here."

ShareThis

Buzz up!

Agencies give shelter to half of Haiti's homeless

This story is taken from Sacbee / Our Region / Wire Nation/World / Wire World News


Agencies give shelter to half of Haiti's homeless
The Associated Press
Published Sunday, Mar. 07, 2010


PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Aid agencies say they have delivered emergency shelter to half of the 1.3 million people in need following the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti.

Gregg McDonald of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies calls the milestone "an achievement that should not be underestimated."

The agencies announced the accomplishment Sunday, saying they hope to reach two-thirds of the homeless by April 1, when rains officially start.

The massive humanitarian effort has been criticized for a slow start and early rains have added to the misery of tens of thousands living in impromptu camps under bed sheets stuck on sticks.

Delivery was hampered by a destroyed port, clogged airport and blocked roads.

ShareThis

Buzz up!

Death toll from Haiti earthquake remains a mystery

This story is taken from Sacbee / Living Here / Wire Lifestyle News / Wire Lifestyle



Death toll from Haiti earthquake remains a mystery
McClatchy Newspapers
Published Sunday, Mar. 07, 2010


TITANYEN, Haiti -- The view from the busy two-lane road is spectacular: tall limestone mountains rising to the east and the turquoise Caribbean shimmering to the west.

But this is no tourist resort. It's the site of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of mass graves where government crews buried tens of thousands of people killed by January's 7.0-magnitude earthquake.

While many of the mass graves are clearly marked with white wooden crosses atop mounds of dirt, the precise number of people buried beneath them may never be known. That's because since the earthquake, the Haitian government has not provided a precise accounting of the number of victims.

The disparate figures that government officials have provided over time cannot be verified. However, accounts by truck drivers who transported many of the bodies and workers who helped bury the victims suggest that official figures may not be incorrect.

Establishing a more precise death count is important for several reasons. It would help quantify the human loss, add historic context to one of the Western Hemisphere's worst disasters and help clarify initial confusion over varying death figures.

Haitian government estimates ranged from 100,000 to 270,000 in the days following the earthquake that crumbled thousands of buildings, including the presidential palace, government ministries, schools, churches, businesses and homes.

A government spokesman told The Miami Herald that more than 200,000 people have already been laid to rest in common graves, but that that figure does not include victims still under the rubble and victims buried privately by families or friends.

At the same time, workers at the Port-au-Prince main cemetery said that dozens of private crypts were reopened for earthquake dead.

Though some Haitian officials have talked of logbooks listing victims, two government drivers who carried bodies to mass graves in their dump trucks and one worker who helped bury them in Titanyen said they did not see anyone keeping tabs.

The drivers and the worker said the main mass graves were in the Titanyen area, about 50 miles north of Port-au-Prince.

Assad Volcy, a spokesman for the National Palace, said more than 200,000 Haitians have been buried in common graves. He explained that government experts devised a formula to estimate how many quake victims have been buried.

But Volcy said he did not know what the formula was. He promised to obtain an explanation of the formula but he has not.

Asked about multiple conflicting figures cited by the Haitian government in the days and weeks after the earthquake, including one as high as 270,000, Volcy said the figures reflected estimates that rose as officials continued to "count" victims.

The figure of 270,000, according to the Haitian government, was cited by President Rene Preval during a meeting in Ecuador in mid-February with South American leaders.

The number was much higher than the first specific death toll of 111,481 issued on Jan. 23.

The next official figure, issued Jan. 24, put the death toll at 150,000. On Feb. 6, the government raised the figure to 212,000. On Feb. 9, the official figure jumped to 230,000.

The next day Preval was quoted as saying 270,000 dead in a communique issued in Port-au-Prince, which his government withdrew a few hours later, citing a typo. A short time later, also on Feb.10, a second communique was issued changing the figure to 170,000.

In an interview, Volcy said that the varying death tolls reflected rising estimates as officials "counted" more and more dead. But Volcy also could not account for the 60,000-body discrepancy between the Feb. 9 and Feb.10 estimates.

Asked if Haitian officials were confused, Volcy said no.

"There has been no confusion," he said. "Perhaps there was an error, but our estimates have been based on a formula to estimate numbers."

Volcy said that according to the formula, which he could not explain, the number of bodies buried in common graves was more than 200,000. The figure excludes bodies still under the rubble or buried in private funerals, he added.

In an interview, a senior Haitian transportation official said his agency transported at least 170,000 bodies to mass graves in the Titanyen area in the first three weeks after the earthquake.

Jean Gardy Ligonde, technical director of the government-run transportation and construction agency known as Centre National des Equipment or CNE, said that between 80 and 100 dump trucks carried the bodies, with each truck making several trips a day.

"Some trucks carried as few as five bodies, others as many as 20 or 50 or 130," Ligonde said.

Asked if CNE kept precise logbooks listing each body picked up on the street, Ligonde said the agency did not. His statement contradicts that of his boss, Jude Celestin who told The Miami Herald in the days following the quake that CNE workers carried a log with them to keep track of the bodies as they were being loaded into dump trucks.

After the interview, Ligonde called The Miami Herald and said he had been mistaken and that indeed logbooks were kept, but CNE officials said they didn't have them.

Ligonde said he believes the number of dead is higher than the 170,000 CNE trucks carried to the Titanyen area because bodies also were picked up by private dump trucks and dump trucks belonging to Haiti's sanitation department, Service Metropolitain de Collecte de Residus Solides or SMCRS.

Harry Toussaint, the SMCRS coordinator, said in an interview that his agency used 10 of its 14 dump trucks to pick up bodies. He said his trucks also carried the bodies to the Titanyen area.

Toussaint said his trucks made between two and four trips a day carrying at most 50 bodies per truck. Toussaint said SMCRS' involvement in the collection and transportation of bodies lasted only a few days, from about Jan. 14 to about Jan. 19, but added that SMCRS did not keep a precise count of bodies it transported.

Nelis St. Ange, for example, said that in the first two or three weeks after the earthquake, he transported between 100 and 150 bodies on each of the five to six trips he made every day between Port-au-Prince and the mass grave area in Titanyen.

A second driver, Mario Yancy, relayed a similar account.

Yancy and St. Ange said they drove the bodies to open graves dug by other workers in Titanyen, an area of limestone mountains, farms and small seaside motels and bars along the two-lane National Route One from Port-au-Prince to Cap Haitien in the north.

Maxis Maxime, a farmer in the area who says he helped bury victims, said trucks ferrying bodies came to the open mass graves and dumped bodies in them for about two to three weeks after the earthquake.

"They came in the morning, in the afternoon and in the early evening, day after day, bringing many, many victims," Maxime recalled. "They stopped coming after the third week."

ShareThis

Buzz up!

Donations from Americans for Haiti top $1 billion

The Associated Press
Published Friday, Mar. 05, 2010


NEW YORK -- Experts who track charitable giving say donations from Americans for earthquake relief in Haiti have passed the $1 billion mark.

The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University has been monitoring donations received by 91 charities engaged in Haiti relief since the quake on Jan. 12. The total surpassed $1 billion as of Friday. About one-third of it has gone to the American Red Cross.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy says other major recipients of Haiti donations include Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. Fund for UNICEF and the U.S. wing of Doctors Without Borders.

Billions for Haiti, a criticism for every dollar

Billions for Haiti, a criticism for every dollar


By JONATHAN M. KATZ
Associated Press Writer
Published: Friday, Mar. 5, 2010 - 12:29 pm
Last Modified: Friday, Mar. 5, 2010 - 4:24 pm
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- The world's bill for the Haitian earthquake is large and growing - now $2.2 billion - and so is the criticism about how the money is being spent.

A half-million homeless received tarps and tents; far more are still waiting under soggy bed sheets in camps that reek of human waste. More than 4.3 million people got emergency food rations; few will be able to feed themselves anytime soon. Medical aid went to thousands, but long-term care isn't even on the horizon.

International aid groups and officials readily acknowledge they are overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster. Haitian leaders - frustrated that billions are bypassing them in favor of U.N. agencies and American and other non-governmental organizations - are whipping up sentiment against foreign aid groups they say have gone out of control.

In the past few days, someone scrawled graffiti declaring "Down with NGO thieves" along the cracked walls that line the road between Port-au-Prince's international airport, the temporary government headquarters, and a U.N. base.

Ahead of a crucial March 31 post-quake donors conference in New York, many are taking a hard look at the money that's flowed in so far.

First the good news: Assistance has indeed been pouring into Haiti, sometimes from unexpected places.

Donations from Americans for earthquake relief in Haiti have surpassed $1 billion, with about one-third going to the American Red Cross, the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University said Friday. Other major recipients include Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. Fund for UNICEF and the U.S. wing of Doctors Without Borders, according to a separate report by the Chronicle for Philanthropy.

An analysis of U.N. data shows that private donations make up the bulk of the total, accounting for more than $980 million of what has already been delivered or that donors have promised.

The United States leads all countries with its commitments of $713 million - with Canada, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Japan and the European Union among other top donors. Saudi Arabia poured $50 million of its oil wealth into the U.N. Emergency Response Relief Fund. Even countries with their own troubles rushed to Haiti's aid: Afghanistan provided $200,000.

A Nevada real estate developer agreed to send $5 million worth of circus tents formerly used by Cirque du Soleil. Leonardo DiCaprio and Coca-Cola are each sending $1 million. Dollar General is donating $100,000. Hanesbrands is shipping 2 million pairs of underwear.

But leaders including Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive are not happy with the way the aid money is being delivered.

"The NGOs don't tell us ... where the money's coming from or how they're spending it," he told The Associated Press. "Too many people are raising money without any controls, and don't explain what they're doing with it."

Haiti wanted aid organizations to register with the government long before the quake, a goal identified as a priority by former U.S. President Bill Clinton when he was named U.N. special envoy in 2009. But it was never completed.

U.N. and U.S. officials said there is close monitoring of NGOs who receive funds. The U.S. Agency for International Development requires recipient groups to file reports every two weeks on how their activities are lining up with their planned programs, said Julie Leonard, leader of the agency's Disaster Assistance Response Team.

Governments tend to give funds to agencies from their own countries.

USAID paid at least $160 million of its total Haiti-related expenditures to the Defense Department, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, two local U.S. search and rescue teams and, in at least two instances, itself.

Tens of millions more went to U.S.-based aid groups. While much of that bought food and other necessities for Haitians, it often did so from U.S. companies - including highly subsidized rice growers whose products are undercutting local producers, driving them out of business.

One cent of every dollar has gone to the Haitian government.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Fund Raising


Haiti Engineering has incorporated as of March 7th, 2010. We are now known as HAITI ENGINEERING, INC.(HE). HE is well on the way to establishing itself as a premiere Engineering Non Government Organization (NGO). We have commenced fund raising activities at all levels, from the donate button on our website, to grant writing through many funding source, both government and private.
~STAFF~

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Haiti aid falling short -- and not in dollars

Haiti aid falling short -- and not in dollars
Posted By Elizabeth Dickinson Tuesday, March 2, 2010 - 6:31 PM Share

A fascinating new report released today by Refugees International on the Haiti aid effort is a striking indictment of the current efforts so far, particularly on the part of the United Nations. As FP's Turtle Bay reported a few weeks back, the "cluster" approach to tackling aid has been a total flop, but the U.N.'s admission. Now, as more details are emerging, this rather depressing excerpt sums it up:

By all accounts, the leadership of the humanitarian country team is ineffectual. Following the earthquake, it took three weeks for the Humanitarian Coordinator to call a meeting with aid organizations. During his visit to Haiti, John Holmes, the UN’s Emergency Relief Coordinator, chastised humanitarian colleagues by pointing out that “several clusters ha[d] yet to establish a concise overview of needs and develop coherent response plans, strategies and gap analyses.” It required his personal intervention to shorten the time frame for the universal distribution of plastic sheeting from May 1st to April 1st. The rainy season is imminent, with thousands of Haitians sleeping outside, lacking even the minimal shelter that plastic sheeting provides.

I don't want to be in the business of chastising U.N. assistance in every global disaster zone, but I must say that some of this strikes me as eerily similar to what I've just reported on in Zimbabwe, where it looks like the United Nations may have failed to respond to a cholera epidemic for months. There, it may have been political pressure keeping things from getting off the ground. In Haiti, it might be politics of another sort ... internal politics, and even competition, between international and local NGOs:

Currently, coordination and communication between Haitian civil society and UN and international NGOs are largely missing, with both sectors operating along parallel and separate lines. Local organizations have a hard time accessing meetings at the UN compound in Port-au-Prince, where UN agencies and international NGOs have established task-specific cluster groups to improve communication across operating agencies, discuss specific needs, and coordinate activities in order to avoid overlap and maximize outreach and coverage of a response. Haitian groups are either unaware of the meetings, do not have proper photo-ID passes for entry, or do not have the staff capacity to spend long hours at the compound.

The report highlights a few other predictable yet tragic difficulties of having so much international aid flowing in:

civilians perceive that the focus of UN peacekeepers as well as U.S. and Canadian military forces has been mainly on the protection of humanitarian workers rather than on Haitians who are at greatest risk during this period of upheaval.

Getting the Haiti aid right -- and quick -- will literally mean life or death for hundreds of thousands in coming months. The report points out that "Some 700,000 people in Port-au-Prince are without homes or proper shelter and another 600,000 people have left the capital." As the rain starts to fall in coming months, those displaced will need shelter and clean water, and a fragmented aid effort means that both will be in short supply.

Monday, March 1, 2010

New Team Members







Haiti Engineering (HE) would like to welcome two new team members. They are Jim Sanders, P.E. and James Lawrence, P.E.

Mr. Sanders brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to HE. Mr. Sanders is a Registered Professional Engineer in both Civil & Traffic. He’s worked as a municipal Building Official, municipal Director of Public Works/City Engineer/Traffic Engineer, as a county Building Plans Examiner. Mr. Sanders has extensive experience in structural design.

Mr. Lawrence has a degree in Environmental Resource Engineering. He is
currently working as Fuel Manager for the California Department of Transportation. Mr. Lawrence will be the Database Specialist for Haiti Engineer.