More on Haiti 100114

1300 hours: CNN reports that ships loaded with relief supplied are standing in the port at Port-au-Prince, and the port facility is INOPERABLE.

Heavy lift crane: bent, buckled, partially submerged.

Wharf unloading area: pilings collapsed, pavements buckled, service roads buckled and impassible.

We will need cargo choppers and or heavy-lift choppers to help unload ships. We also need, probably, some sort of pumping and piping system to move fluid/liquid cargoes such as fuel or potable water from ships in harbor to shore. Probably storage need tanks airlifted in to store such pumped liquids.

We need bridging units and bulldozers to help clear roads from both the harbor and airport.

Relief supplies are starting to arrive in large quantities but questions remain about distribution systems, and such systems seem to be mostly theoretical in the absence of passable streets.

A reasonable idea would be to lift in a few bulldozers and their fuel and set them to work clearing straighter avenues so that medium heavy trucks can roll out aid distribution to the peripheries away from the airport.

As always we advise people to check with the Ushahidi Haiti Information Aggregation and Reporting Site.

We need more and better minds thinking ahead on this, the professionals are either now arriving in the field, more likely in some stage of being in transit, or in staging areas waiting to launch towards Haiti. The Federal Aviation Administration has put a temporary hold on travel to Hispaniola (the island of which Haiti is the western half). It seems that about a dozen heavy aircraft are circling above waiting for opportunity to offload and land.

Part of the need to rapidly adapt at the Port and Harbor is the need for massive amounts of aircraft fuel needed at the Port-au-Prince airport and also at nearby Dominican Republic airports. It seems that the only way to deliver such amounts of fuel for non-military aircraft (military aircraft can refuel in flight in some cases) will be by tanker ship and if they can't unload we could wind up with dozens of heavy aircraft idled on the ground.

Seriously, more heavy-lift choppers, bulldozers etc. Fuel for everything. And sanitation even if that mostly consists of shovels to dig latrine pits, tarps to line the pits, and chlorine bleach in large volumes to disinfect what winds up in the latrine pits.

Water. Lots of water, and engineers to slap an emergency pumping system into place. Some parts of town seem to have some water at the moment but that may be gravity fed from local storage towers.