Haiti news bits UPDATE

7PM IMPORTANT UPDATE BELOW

Anyone feel free to join me here. Im thoroughly disgusted with tv. Ill post a few links from some online sources Ive been perusing.

Video from Miami Herald… Haitians react to Robertson’s idiotic remarks. My advice: skip past the replay of Robertson (about the first minute) or just turn down the volume while you get your kleenex.

Big News: Obama Grants Haitians Illegally in U.S. ‘Protected Status’ for 18 Months (ABC News) h/t thank you Dexter!

The announcement to grant “temporary protective status,” or TPS, to Haitian nationals allows immigrants already in the U.S. to live and work freely here until conditions in Haiti improve. After 18 months the status could be revoked.

“This is a disaster of historic proportions and this designation will allow eligible Haitian nationals in the United States to continue living and working in our country for the next 18 months,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced late today on a conference call. “Providing a temporary refuge for Haitian nationals who are currently in the United States and whose personal safety would be endangered by returning to Haiti is part of this Administration’s continuing efforts to support Haiti’s recovery.”

Napolitano estimated that there are 100,000 to 200,000 Haitian nationals currently in the country illegally.

“TPS gives them sort of an intermediate immigration status,” said the secretary. “It allows them — only for a period of 18 months, while Haiti gets back on its feet — to remain in the United States and authorizes them to work during that period, among other things.”

Im wandering all over the place.

I thought some of you might find this old (2005) article from Naomi Klein interesting: Aristide in Exile.

A few weeks ago I visited Aristide in Pretoria, South Africa, where he lives in forced exile. I asked him what was really behind his dramatic falling-out with Washington. He offered an explanation rarely heard in discussions of Haitian politics–actually, he offered three: “privatization, privatization and privatization.”

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Im very annoyed at the media buzz about looting and violence. Taking food is not looting.

AP: Struggle to get aid to Haitians as looters roam.  

It’s the Framing.

This sucks:

Looters roamed downtown streets, young men and boys with machetes. “They are scavenging everything. What can you do?” said Michel Legros, 53, as he waited for help to search for seven relatives buried in his collapsed house.

This is more like it:

“People who have not been eating or drinking for almost 50 hours and are already in a very poor situation,” U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said in Geneva. “If they see a truck with something, or if they see a supermarket which has collapsed, they just rush to get something to eat.”

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Miami Herald: Port-au-Prince airport `chaos’ keeps relief supplies on ground in Miami

Man, what a logistical nightmare.

Two military planes from Washington, D.C., landed in Port-au-Prince overnight, as did six passenger jets, according to computerized flight data and interviews. But the bulk of the planned airlift of relief supplies — much of it scheduled to leave Miami International — had yet to begin Friday, cargo executives said.

The main problem: a logistical mess at the Port-au-Prince airport, which was left with working runways but a severely damaged control tower and terminal. While the U.S. military is now guiding in planes, the damaged terminal facilities make unloading cargo extremely tedious, the executives said.

Because cargo planes sit so high off the ground and bring in massive freight pallets, workers need industrial equipment to unload the holds. But the Haitian airport, which typically receives only a few cargo planes a day, saw its small collection of equipment damaged in the quake, executives said.

The U.S. military has been bringing in fork lifts and other equipment, but the influx has not been enough to meet the dozens if not hundreds of flights lined up by relief agencies and their corporate sponsors.

Along with unloading the planes, there’s also concern about how to transport the material to Haitians. A big worry: attacks on food convoys by criminal elements or the desperate.

snip

On the pallets: red and black beans, fortified rice, cooking oil, infant formula, syringes, bandages and other medical equipment.

OH. Look. Another diary at GOS re TPS, please go rec it if thats your thing. h/t Robert Naiman, theres an editorial at WaPo and also NYT urging Obama admin to grant temporary protected status for Haitians here.

16 comments

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  1. Photobucket

  2. of the death and destruction.  

    There seems to be a logistical nightmare–between the damaged infrastructure, including at the airport; and the lack of one definitive, easily identified leader to coordination between the multitude of relief groups responding to the disaster.  

    Despite all the roadblocks, help does seem to be slowly getting to the people.  

    Though the waiting is painful and frustrating for those of us watching far from the scene, it must be excruciating for those who are there in the midst of the disaster.  Yet, they are showing such fortitude in the face of this latest tragedy to befall them.  

    Hopefully, the glitches can be ironed out very soon, and help–including medical care, shelter, food and water, etc.–will get to the people quickly.  

    • TMC on January 15, 2010 at 20:03

    Good job. It is hard to get a handle on this catastrophe, no matter where you are.

    • TMC on January 15, 2010 at 20:43

    has good info and had a blog up. We drove to NN09 together. She has done relief work in Haiti and had a diary up at Dkos.

  3. that seems to be abundant, as shown on some of the news reports.  

    On CNN, they have been, and are currently reporting on the way the dead have been left lying in the streets, and/or taken to a mass dump site.  Appallingly, still–into day three of this nightmare, no one seems to have established any method of attempting to documenting the identity of these individuals for the sake of their surviving family members.  Reporters with cameras show this horror, yet none of them seem to realize that they could, after making their public report–film the faces of the dead, and document the date, and the location, then turn the video over to the American embassy, and/or the Haitian government, so that at a future date their families could review the pictures, if they wish to–just so they will know what happened to their loved ones.

    Maybe some of them are doing more than just reporting publicly, but I’d hope that after the many disasters that have happened in recent years, we’d have examined the failures of the previous events, and try to have a better plan for the next one.  I realize that each event has unique issues–geographical, government entities, etc., but how sad that five years after Katrina, so many families will still have to face the fact that their loved ones are missing, but not ever knowing exactly where their bodies are.  

  4. WTF!

    5.6 magnitude quake hits the State owned oil refinery!

    CARACAS – A medium strength earthquake caused panic in the small eastern Venezuelan coastal town of Carupano on Friday and shook the nearby city of Puerto La Cruz, which contains an oil refinery, but no damage was reported.

    Just heard something to the effect that doctors and nurses are being located in a specific area?????? (Looking for more on it!)  TMC — know anything about this?

    • Dexter on January 16, 2010 at 00:37

    Sec Napolitano announced at 5pm est that they are extending TPS to Haitians.  It’s not enough, but it’s a start.  

  5. Been awol most of today and havent read/seen much (except for the unfortunate experience of waking up to my husband telling me to come watch the Three Stooges this morning on TV)… anyway… heres this.

    Haiti: MSF Surgical Activities Are Non-Stop; Needs Remain Huge

    Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) surgical units in Port-au-Prince continue to work around the clock to treat the vast numbers of patients with serious injuries from the January 12 earthquake. Prioritizing the most serious cases, the teams have been performing caesarian sections and amputations. Experienced MSF medical staff say they have never seen so many serious injuries.

    An MSF surgical team that relocated to Chocsal Hospital after its facility in Martissant was badly damaged has been working non-stop since early on Friday. At Trinité trauma hospital, where the team is treating people under canvas on the grounds of the medical facility that was hit by the earthquake, surgery has been taking place in an improvised operating theater. In Carrefour, a district that was very badly affected, MSF has just started working in a hospital with two operating theatres.

    One of MSF’s operational coordinators in Port-au-Prince, Hans van Dillen, says there was an immediate reaction when people found out that we were starting medical activities in Carrefour. People began crowding around the entrance. Patients are being brought in by wheelbarrow and on others’ backs. There are other hospitals in the area but they are already overflowing with injured people and have limited numbers of Haitian staff or supplies.

    The struggle to find more buildings that could be used for MSF’s medical work is continuing, as are the efforts to get more medical staff and supplies into the country. The major difficulty here is the bottleneck at the airport, which has turned away a number of vital cargo flights. Lack of authorization to land at the airport has already caused a 24-hour delay of the planned arrival of MSF’s much needed inflatable hospital.

    MSF has managed to get more than 70 additional staff into Port-au-Prince, mostly through neighboring Dominican Republic. They are beginning to take some of the strain off the teams who were already there when the quake struck.

  6. Logistics of MSF’s Intervention 01/15/10

    What are the logistical problems the teams are dealing with today?

    Right now we still are struggling to treat patents in very rough conditions. The biggest problem is not having medical structures where we can treat them. But we have been able to find an open space big enough for the inflatable hospital that should arrive tomorrow. So we will have a 100-bed hospital with surgical capacity operation before the end of next week.

    What about other logistical factors required for surgery – water, electricity?

    We have roughly a week’s worth of water in stock and we have generators for electricity. The hospital is coming fully logistically equipped, including sanitation, x-ray machines, everything. It’s a kind of plug and play hospital.

    But a big issue will be the supply of fuel. We cannot find any diesel fuel in the city. At the MSF projects I am in touch with, today we have roughly two to three days maximum of fuel in stock. So we need to start work on an emergency supply chain, either from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, or from Miami, we don’t know yet which will be the best way.

  7. not a news update, something else. a blogpost. makes sense.

    Those who have observed that US aid is slow getting to Haiti, such as the Navy’s USS Comfort which is leaving Baltimore, Md., only TODAY, should understand that the US is concentrating on getting military boots on the ground first.  By the end of the weekend, the US will have 10,000 military in Haiti.  Once this is done, it will be “safe” for aid workers to tend to the injured in the popular neighborhoods.  As time goes on, pay attention to the back story and you will see that the placement of these soldiers has more to do with stemming a political tsunami than helping the people.

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