Comment upgrade: More Haiti data
Sunday, January 24, 2010 at 12:32AM A couple of days ago, I cited two WAPO pieces that suggested Haiti was dissolving into lawlessness (not uncommon after a major disaster--looting, vigilantism and score-settling all tend to pop up to some degree after a System Perturbation of this magnitude).
To counter this impression, reader Shane Deichman relays an email from Eric Rasmussen, CEO of inSTEDD, an IT-focused group that works to improve post-disaster management. The electronic missive presents an on-the-ground perspective highly at odds with WAPO's reporting (and my post's too-enthusiastic amplification). I'm almost certain I know Eric from a past life (he was Navy for a long time), because his name is quite familiar.
Anyway, here's what Eric wrote in a broadcast email:
Friends,
I've just returned from driving all over PaP. We stopped and talked. We were in the national park, the palace grounds, up in Delmas, and around the airport. The place is calm, sad, and massively under-resourced. That is no surprise - we're ramping up - but there is an important issue skewing the response a little.
In more than two hours of assessment, I saw two SAR teams and one water truck. I was in the hardest hit areas. No food aid visible. One water truck. The rumor is that security - a force protection requirement - is impeding aid delivery.
If there are security concerns I'm not sure what is driving them. There are isolated incidents, but Port au Prince is a city of more than 1.2 million. Delmas has more than 400,000. There is going to be crime, stupid people, angry people, but they're isolated. This is an impressively controlled crowd and they are TRYING to be well-behaved so that aid will flow. There are more than 20,000 in the Palace Park alone. They fully recognize the risk if they tolerate violence.
My driver offered to wrap every medical worker in 5 Haitians to make sure they'd feel safe.
I saw untreated open fractures. Obvious head trauma. Obvious psych trauma. Major avulsions. No medical surveys evident on the street. Hospital clearly overloaded. I have photographs.
Can we please ensure that we avoid looking like we're hiding from poor, weak, injured people who need help? The perceived security posture is getting quite a bit of play in the community and may not serve anyone well. The transcript below is locally discussed. As it happens I know Chris Elias, CEO of PATH, and he hires good people. I suspect the interview content is accurate.
Eric
What is the exact truth? Both descriptions may hold, depending on exact location and time (the doc's impressions are based on a two-hour tour), but Rasmussen's experienced eye suggests that WAPO's reporting was too extrapolating. Still, note that the pivot on his logic is a "rumor," so you don't want to replace one bad extrapolation with another (as simpler reasons for slow aid-flow are easily imagined). You just want to balance your perceptions suitably until better, more compelling data accumulates.
Remember, we live in a MSM world where the election of one senator from MA is described as an "earthquake" creating "chaos" within Congress! So hyperbole tends to rule, and my mistake was in passing it on too uncritically.
Reader Comments (2)
That note from me was couched in the most conservative terms. On more than one occasion during the acute phase, the Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) teams were held on the base because of security concerns (I worked with USAR Dispatch from roughly post-event day 3-9). They were held because Force Protection was deemed needed, yet there was no FP available. Talk to NY USAR Task Force-1. The rumors of violence held other teams from deploying out of the airport gate (the USAR Base was on the east end of the airfield, inside the wire), despite the fact that the violent events were rare, isolated and scattered around a city area of almost 2M people.
There are many reasons for the difficulties in the deployment of aid in Haiti: Haiti is an island, it's a failed state in many ways, the transportation and communications infrastructure have been destroyed, no heavy equipment anywhere in the country, no staff support (water, food housing), no street signs, endemic disease risks in TB and malaria, unfamiliar local language - many reasons. So to have an inadequately evaluated security posture impede the delivery of what acute care we COULD achieve, particularly in the initial rescue phase, was regrettable.
The MDM after my name is a European Masters in Disaster Medicine from WHO/CEMEC. I served on the Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) in Iraq at the onset of the war in 2003. I have watched, repeatedly, as the US military reads the cloudy tea leaves of inadequate information through the lens we know - conflict and threat. While I do not advocate dismissing threat assessments, the conclusions we reach, and then propagate, are often uninformed by context or culture, and impeded by language and a selection bias that skews our conclusions toward an unwarranted degree of self-protection. That posture is readily visible in the world and does not enhance either the image we're prefer to portray, or the morale of our troops sent to help in humanitarian relief operations, or our effectiveness in the tasks we've been sent to accomplish. Lose-Lose-Lose.