Friday, January 15, 2010

Haiti News Update: US to Deploy 10,000 Troops; Scientists Warned of Quake in 2008

Mullen: 9,000 to 10,000 troops in Haiti by Monday

By ROBERT BURNS and PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writers

WASHINGTON – Up to 10,000 U.S. troops will be off Haiti's shores by Monday to help distribute aid and prevent potential rioting among desperate earthquake survivors, the top U.S. military officer said Friday, as President Obama pledged long-term reconstruction help to President Rene Preval.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also said the total American presence in and around the beleaguered country could rise beyond 10,000 as U.S. military officers determine how much assistance may be needed in the days ahead.

His assessment came as the State Department updated the toll of U.S. dead from Tuesday's 7.0 magnitude quake to six and cautioned that the casualty count is likely to rise still further.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said that in addition to the previously reported death of agency employee Victoria DeLong, there have been at least five other confirmed U.S. deaths — all private U.S. citizens whose names have not been released publicly.

"And that number is going to go up," Crowley told reporters without offering a specific forecast.

DeLong, a cultural affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy, was killed when her home collapsed in the earthquake.

Obama, who had been unable to contact Preval several times this week, talked for 30 minutes with the Haitian leader, the White House said.

Obama told Preval the world has been devastated by the loss and suffering and pledged full U.S. support for both the immediate recovery effort and the long-term reconstruction. Preval said that the needs in his country are great, but that aid is now making its way to the Haitian people. Preval ended the call with a message to the American people, saying "from the bottom of my heart and on behalf of the Haitian people, thank you, thank you, thank you."

Obama planned a public statement on the situation from the White House at 1 p.m. EST.

In a joint news conference at the Pentagon with Mullen, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the primary goal is to distribute aid as quickly as possible "so that people don't, in their desperation, turn to violence." He suggested that the U.S. is aware of perceptions it could have too-high a profile in the ravaged country.

"I think that if we, particularly given the role that we will have in delivering food and water and medical help to people, my guess is the reaction will be one of relief at seeing Americans providing this kind of help," Gates told reporters.

The secretary also said "there will be a lot of other people there as well," noting Brazil also has a significant presence. He said it was vital to get food and water into the country and called the security situation "pretty good," except for some isolated cases of scavenging for food and water.

The secretary said military planners have been reluctant to drop food and water packages from the air because it could lead to lead to rioting. But bringing in supplies by sea and air have proved difficult because of Haiti's badly damaged sea port and congested airport.

Crowley, the State Department spokesman, acknowledged the limitations of the initial U.S. effort to get water, food and other emergency requirements into Haiti. He said, for example, that the main port at Port-au-Prince, the capital, was so badly damaged in the quake that it is not useable. He likened the stream of aid thus far as flowing through a "garden hose" that must be widened to a "river."

The arrival off the Haitian coast of the USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier laden with helicopters, essentially provides a "second airport" from which aid can be delivered to the stricken capital, Crowley said.

As of Friday morning, 846 of the approximately 45,000 Americans in Haiti had been evacuated from the country, Crowley said. Another 160 were at the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince awaiting evacuation, he added.

Gates said the U.N. peacekeeping force in Haiti has primary responsibility for security in the capital.

Mullen said the hospital ship USNS Comfort, with hundreds of medical professionals and medical support, should be off the Haitian coast by the end of next week.

"While these assets tend to the immediate material and medical needs of the people of Haiti, these ships, aircraft and troops also deliver hope, although it seems that supplies and security cannot come quickly enough," Mullen said.


Scientists warned Haiti officials of quake in '08

By RICK CALLAHAN, Associated Press Writer
Fri Jan 15, 6:18 am ET

INDIANAPOLIS – Scientists who detected worrisome signs of growing stresses in the fault that unleashed this week's devastating earthquake in Haiti said they warned officials there two years ago that their country was ripe for a major earthquake.

Their sobering findings, presented during a geological conference in March 2008 and at meetings two months later, showed that the fault was capable of causing a 7.2-magnitude earthquake — slightly stronger than Tuesday's 7.0 quake that rocked the impoverished country.

Though Haitian officials listened intently to the research, the nearly two years between the presentation and the devastating quake was not enough time for Haiti to have done much to have prevented the massive destruction.

"It's too short of a timeframe to really do something, particularly for a country like Haiti, but even in a developed country it's very difficult to start very big operations in two years," Eric Calais, a professor of geophysics at Purdue University, said Thursday.

Their conclusions also lacked a specific timeframe that could have prodded quick action to shore up the hospitals, schools and other buildings that collapsed and crumbled, said Paul Mann, a senior research scientist at the University of Texas' Institute for Geophysics.

At the time of earthquake, which the international Red Cross estimated killed 45,000 to 50,000 people, Haiti was still trying to recover from a string catastrophes. In 2008 alone, it was hit four times by tropical storms and hurricanes. The country also suffers from a string of social ills including poverty, unstable governments and poor building standards that make buildings vulnerable in earthquakes.

"Haiti's government has so many other problems that when you give sort of an unspecific prediction about an earthquake threat they just don't have the resources to deal with that sort of thing," Mann said.

In March 2008, Calais and Mann were among a group of scientists who presented findings on the major quake risk along the Enriquillo fault during the conference in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. Their conclusions were based both on geologic work Mann conducted along the same fault and recent findings by Calais.

Calais had detected rising stresses along the fault using global positioning system measurements that showed that the Earth's crust in the area where the fault traverses southern Haiti was slowly deforming as pressure grew within the fault.

That pressure, paired with Mann's work and the fact that the last major quake in the area was in 1770, led to the prediction that the fault could produce a 7.2-magnitude temblor.

Calais said he also presented the findings to officials in Haiti during a series of meetings in May 2008 that included the country's prime minister and other high-ranking officials. He said he stressed to the officials that if they did nothing else they should at least begin reinforcing hospitals, schools and key government buildings to weather a strong quake.

"We were taken very seriously but unfortunately it didn't translate into action," he said. "The reality is that it was too short of a timeframe to really do something, particularly for a country like Haiti struggling with so many problems."

Calais said Haiti has no seismic stations for monitoring quake activity, while adjoining Dominican Republic has a small seismic network.

Although the specific risks of the fault zone near Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, may not have been known until recent years, the region has a long history of major earthquakes, said Carol Prentice, a U.S. Geological Survey research geologist based in Menlo Park, Calif.

Those include earthquakes that destroyed Jamaica's capital, Kingston, in 1692 and 1907, that also occurred along the Enriquillo fault, which extends hundreds of miles through the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Jamaica.

She said Calais' GPS studies were the first along the fault to quantify the potential quake risk in the heavily populated Port-au-Prince area.

Prentice said she, Calais and Mann had sought U.S. government funding over the years for detailed excavations in southern Haiti to document evidence of past quakes in soil layers along the fault but that work has not yet been funded.

"It's entirely possible that we'll see additional quakes along this fault in the years to come. But we really don't know the risk if those studies aren't done," she said.


January 15, 2010

Tensions Mount in Devastated Capital as Nations Step Up Aid Pledges to Haiti

By MARC LACEY
New York Times

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The distance between life and death narrowed in this flattened city on Thursday, with survival two days after the huge earthquake struck depending increasingly on the luck of being freed from under rubble, on treating the thousands of wounded and on speeding the halting flow of emergency food and water.

“Get me out!” came the haunting voice of a teenager, Jhon Verpre Markenley, from a dark crevice of the trade school that collapsed around him and fellow students.

Mr. Verpre’s father risked his own life to save his son’s, crouching deep into the hole with a blowtorch to try to wear away the metal that had his son’s leg pinned down inside. Hours later, the young man was free. His mother danced.

By Thursday evening, the Haitian president, René Préval, said that 7,000 people had already been buried in a mass grave. Hundreds of corpses piled up outside the city’s morgue, next to a hospital struggling to prevent those numbers from rising. On street corners, people pulled their shirts up over their faces to filter out the thickening smell of the dead.

With reports of looting and scuffles over water and food, President Obama promised $100 million in aid, as the first wave of a projected 5,000 American troops began arriving to provide security and the infrastructure for the expected flood of aid from around the world.

“You will not be forsaken, you will not be forgotten,” Mr. Obama told the Haitian people in an emotional address at the White House on Thursday. “In this, your hour of greatest need, America stands with you.”

Help was only beginning to arrive Thursday as the United States military took over the wrecked air traffic control system to land cargo planes with food and water, though the airport was clogged and chaotic with little or no fuel for planes to return. Doctors and search-and-rescue teams worked mostly with the few materials in hand and waited, frustrated, for more supplies, especially much needed heavy equipment.

“Where’s the response?” asked Eduardo A. Fierro, a structural engineer from California who had arrived earlier in the day to inspect quake-damaged buildings. “You can’t do anything about the dead bodies, but inside many of these buildings people may still be alive. And their time is running out.”

United Nations officials said that Haitians were growing hopeless — and beginning to run out of patience.

“They are slowly getting more angry,” said David Winhurst, the spokesman for the United Nations mission in Haiti, speaking by video link from the Port-au-Prince airport. “We are all aware of the fact that the situation is getting more tense.”

The Haitian National Police had virtually disappeared, Mr. Winhurst and another senior United Nations official said, and no longer had a presence on the streets, though witnesses at the city’s already filled main morgue reported seeing police pickup trucks dropping off bodies collected from around the city.

The United Nations officials said that the 3,000 peacekeeping troops around the capital would probably be sufficient to handle any unrest, but that plans were being made to bring in reinforcements from the 6,000 others scattered around the country.

The struggle to survive intensified Thursday, in dramas that played out around this city that has already suffered more than most, from centuries of poverty, violence and natural disaster. Despite the strength of the magnitude 7.0 earthquake, the United Nations reported that the damage, in fact, appeared to be confined to the capital and a few outlying areas, with the rest of the country largely spared.

Ronald Jedna, covered in white dust atop a damaged building, had just been freed, after spending a day caught in a crevice of his apartment building with heavy beams pressing in tight against his chest.

He said he tried to cry out but his throat was too dry and he was too weak. Only a whisper would come out. Eventually, though, a neighbor peered through a tiny slit, discovered him and managed to pry him loose.

“A day felt like a year,” he said. “You’re buried alive. You can’t scream. You wonder if anyone will ever come.”

Mr. Jedna had a deep, untreated wound in his shin. He stood atop the rubble looking for others who might still be breathing.

The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, described another “small miracle during a night which brought few other miracles.” An Estonian bodyguard named Tarmo Joveer was recovered, virtually unscathed, from beneath 13 feet of debris at the United Nations offices at the Christopher Hotel on Thursday morning, where 100 more of the organization’s workers remained buried inside. Rescuers found him with the help of electronic sensors and dogs brought in by the American, Chinese and French teams, and had helped keep him alive by piping him water through a tube.

But hope was fading for perhaps tens of thousands of others.

Residents interviewed through the city said that the cries that they heard emanating from many collapsed buildings in the initial hours after the quake had begun to soften, if not quiet completely.

“There’s no more life here,” said a grandmother, who nonetheless rapped a broom against concrete in hopes that her four missing relatives believed to be buried inside might somehow respond.

Pascale Valérie Lisnay, whose brother was buried in the collapsed trade school, said she longed to hear anything from him, a moan, a cry, anything to give her hope that he was still alive. Standing outside one of countless similarly horrible sites across Port-au-Prince, she dialed her brother’s cellphone number again and again, tears filling her eyes each time it failed to connect.

“He’s gone,” she said.

The United Nations said it had confirmed that 36 of its workers had been killed in the earthquake, 73 had been injured, and an additional 160 were still missing. The United Nations began an effort to send teams around to the homes of its more than 1,200 local staff members to see if they were still alive and what help they needed, the two officials said.

At the ruins of the Montana Hotel, where many United Nations workers stayed, a French rescue team had extracted three people alive and one corpse, said Mr. Winhurst, the United Nations spokesman. Once the machines come in to lift large blocks of concrete both there and around the city, the toll is expected to mount sharply.

Mr. Winhurst himself was inside the Christopher Hotel at the time the earthquake struck.

“It accelerated with extreme violence,” he said. The room was shaking so violently that he held on to avoid being thrown to the floor, praying that the pillar in his office would not topple over on him. After the shaking stopped, he navigated down three stories on a rickety ladder.

Kim Bolduc, the chief humanitarian coordinator for the mission, said she was sitting in her second-floor office in another United Nations building when the room shook violently and a huge crack opened in the wall in front of her. “I was just hoping it would stop,” she said.

The difficulties medical workers and rescue teams faced drew anguish far beyond Haiti’s borders. Dr. Irwin Redlener, a professor of pediatrics at Columbia University’s medical school who is also the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and the president of the Children’s Health Fund, said he feared for the children of Port-au-Prince.

“Something like 40 to 50 percent of the population of Port-au-Prince is kids,” he said. “Kids are much more fragile — a 30-pound block of a wall that would only seriously injure an adult will kill a child. They die much more rapidly of dehydration, of loss of blood, of shock. An infection will cause explosive diarrhea, which can kill a trapped child. Everything about this is devastatingly worse for kids than for adults.

“There’s a 72-hour window for getting people out of rubble before you have a huge increase in fatalities,” he said. “We’re already at 48 hours, and I’m seeing on TV locals with a shovel trying to free a child and debating whether they would have to amputate the leg themselves. Where are the search-and-rescue workers? Where are the medical teams?”

Reporting was contributed by Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations, Damien Cave from Port-au-Prince, Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York, and Ginger Thompson, Elisabeth Bumiller, Helene Cooper and Brian Knowlton from Washington.


Haiti: Where will all the money go?

Sharon Theimer, Associated Press Writer
Fri Jan 15, 7:58 am ET

WASHINGTON – Haiti has received billions of dollars in taxpayer and private aid from the United States and others, yet is so poor that few homes had safe drinking water, sewage disposal or electricity even before the earthquake. With sympathetic donors around the world sending money, making sure that aid is spent properly will be a challenge.

Corruption, theft and other crime and Haiti's sheer shortage of fundamentals — reliable roads, telephone and power lines and a sound financial system — add to the difficulty as foreign governments and charities try not only to help Haiti recover from the disaster but pull itself out of abject poverty.

It is one of the poorest places on Earth. Most basic public services are lacking, people typically live on less than $2 a day, nearly half the population is illiterate and the government has a history of instability. The public has little opportunity to be sure that aid to the government is used honestly and well. Nor is following the money easy for donors, including the United States, 700 miles away and one of the country's biggest helpers.

"It has been a challenge and I think it really is one of the things we have to look at when the country has had such long-standing problems that it seems as though we have made little dent there," said Rep. Russ Carnahan, D-Mo., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's subcommittee on international organizations, human rights and oversight.

The immediate focus is search and rescue and addressing immediate public health needs. But after that, "I think there's going to be a number of questions that arise," Carnahan said.

Just last month, a private group, the Heritage Foundation for Haiti, urged Haiti's government to complete an audit of a $197 million emergency disaster program to respond to corruption allegations over how the money was handled. Haiti's senate cited the allegations when it removed Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis in November and replaced her with Jean-Max Bellerive.

President Barack Obama promised at least $100 million in earthquake aid. That comes on top of substantial spending by the United States in Haiti in recent years for economic development, such as the country's textile industry, humanitarian assistance, environmental programs, and law enforcement, including trying to stop the use of Haiti as a pass-through point for narcotics en route to the United States.

Apart from earthquake relief, senators working on the next annual foreign assistance budget have proposed at least $282 million for Haiti; the House proposal would provide at least $165 million.

Much of the U.S. government's aid to Haiti comes through the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has provided at least $800 million from budget years 2004 through 2008, agency figures show.

At least $700 million more was pledged for Haiti by governments, international givers and charities at an April 2009 donors conference. Former President Bill Clinton, a United Nations special envoy to the country, told the U.N. Security Council in September that he was "100 percent committed to delivering tangible results to the U.N. and most importantly the people of Haiti."

The Haitian government relies on foreign aid to keep itself and its economy operating.

In a December 2008 Gallup survey, 60 percent of Haitians interviewed said there had been times that year when they didn't have enough money to buy food, and 51 percent said there were times they couldn't afford shelter.

Statistics about Haiti, as gathered by the U.S. government, chronicle a grim standard of living. According to the CIA and State Department, 1 in 8 children in Haiti dies before age 5. The life expectancy is 59 to 62 years. Malaria, typhoid and dengue fevers and other life-threatening illnesses long ago wiped out in the industrialized world still plague Haiti.

For government and private relief organizations, simply communicating and moving money and supplies around in the country were difficult absent a natural disaster like this one.

As of 2008, Haiti had 108,000 main telephone lines in use, putting it 142nd among countries in land-line phone use, but ranked better on cellular access. There were 3.2 million cellular phones in use in 2008, making it 105th worldwide by that measure, the U.S. government said.

"Attention on Haiti is often focused in times of disaster but not necessarily in the long-term," said Rich Thorsten, director of international programs for Water.org, a charity working to provide safe drinking water and sewage treatment to Haitians. "Funding that has been available does not necessarily go toward basic infrastructure like water and sanitation."

The Haitian government doesn't use its own resources for sanitation, and instead depends on charities, Thorsten said. In addition, international groups often do not coordinate, and there are also problems with security, corruption and political stability, he said.

"It is very important to keep track of the spending, and so when we work with partner organizations we make sure they have detailed accounting systems," he said. Supplies must be guarded, he added.

No comments: