ME&MEE

Day 3 in our series on EA USA’s Haiti earthquake assistance efforts from our team on the ground in the Dominican Republic. Following is an account from Richard Knight, our head of Emergency Logistics.

A strong aftershock hit west of Port-au-Prince at 6am and it is unknown at this time how much further damage has been caused. What is clear is that some of the foreign nationals who decided to stay after the first quake are, understandably, reconsidering their decision.

The knock-on effect to this is that today we have had a stream of requests from people now wanting to get out. Because of this I have spent most of my day at Santa Domingo airport locating helicopters and empty charter flights going in and out of the area in case we need to get people on them. Furthermore I have been communicating all day with different air ambulance teams standing by to go in should we need to get a second round of medevacs going.

One thing that everyone agrees on is that it is now becoming almost impossible to land at Port-au-Prince. Currently the landing slots are “officially” all booked until early February. Because of this there appears to have been an overall change in plan.

There are reports that the US military are about to begin focusing on alternate airports to use in the hope that this helps clear the landing pattern at Port-au-Prince. The main airport now being looked at is Jacmel to the south of Port-au-Prince with other airports being considered just over the border in the Dominican Republic.

The aid agencies have already cottoned onto this as a lot of the existing airports over the border in the Dominican Republic are also extremely congested.  The plan is for the aid agency flights to now go to other countries surrounding Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the hope that as the flights clear, there will be a secondary wave of aid coming in. Although this is a sensible plan from a logistics point of view, the downside is all of this will take time and this is one thing the people of Haiti do not have.