Breaking News: 7.0 Earthquake in Haiti

[katmai]

14 UN relief workers confirmed dead.  150 more mission, including the mission director.

It's like starting from scratch.  There's nobody on the ground to coordinate.  Infrastructure is just gone.

Heard the Archbishop had died as well. I'm sure Marti is cheering, but...

[jimmy olsen]

14 UN relief workers confirmed dead.  150 more mission, including the mission director.

It's like starting from scratch.  There's nobody on the ground to coordinate.  Infrastructure is just gone.

Heard the Archbishop had died as well. I'm sure Marti is cheering, but...

The Parliament building collapsed as well and the President of the Senate is presumed dead.

[jimmy olsen]

What a cluster fuck, it seems there are no hospitals left that are structurally sound in Port-au-Prince, doctors without borders are basically doing operations in a parking lot.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34843404/ns/world_news-haiti_earthquake/

By Robert Bazell
Chief science and health correspondent
NBC News
updated 12:09 p.m. PT, Wed., Jan. 13, 2010

Robert Bazell
Chief science and health correspondent

Even before the 7.0 earthquake that is believed to have killed thousands of people and crushed countless buildings, the medical infrastructure in Haiti was already almost nonexistent.

While the primary focus of the next 72 hours is rescue and saving lives, officials say, aid workers are facing countless critical medical needs for the millions who have been affected by the widespread destruction.

NBC's Chief Science and Health Correspondent Robert Bazell, who has reported extensively from Haiti on the AIDS epidemic and other infectious disease outbreaks, is heading to the country tonight to cover the ongoing rescue and recovery for "NBC Nightly News." Bazell offers an overview of the health crisis facing the devastated country. Read on for more.

What are the immediate medical concerns facing rescue workers?

Today we learned from Doctors Without Borders that there are no hospitals remaining in Port-au-Prince. All hospitals are either collapsed or abandoned, including the three run by the aid group.

According to Doctors Without Borders, there are enormous lines of people outside of these closed facilities, many with severe injuries, including fractured bones and crushed skulls waiting for treatment. But there's no medical treatment happening because the area has absolutely no facilities. Even before, the hospitals that existed had almost nothing that we would consider an intensive care unit. And Haiti has no system of frontline responders to rescue and revive people in emergencies.

The people from DWB said even trying to set up new facilities during the night and continuing into the day has been very difficult because there's enormous amounts of rubble on the road — and when there's rubble there are either injured people or dead bodies. So, it's a particularly dangerous situation.

Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere. In fact, it's the fourth poorest in the entire world, with 85 percent of the population earning less than $1 a day.

All this combines to make what was a health nightmare already very bad.

Deadly diseases can develop in a few days without access to clean water or sanitation. What is the situation in the country?
Fewer than one-third of the population has access to sanitation facilities. Fewer than half have access to clean drinking water. There is enormous burden of diarrheal illnesses in the country, anyway.

In addition to that, malaria is very prevalent and so is starvation because of the poverty. You're starting with a situation where it couldn't be much worse for a crisis of this magnitude to strike, because the country has already been in an ongoing crisis for so long.

In the slums of Port-au-Prince, which is where most of the people live, open sewage exists. When you add that risk of infection to people with severe injuries and dead bodies, it becomes an almost unimaginably difficult situation.

These quake refugees will also likely face an increased risk of dengue fever and measles, both already problems there.   

Although aid is starting to come in, it will take a while to reach victims. A lot of people won't survive in the meantime. Because Haiti already has about 450,000 people who are known to be infected with HIV, it's also very difficult to ensure the safety of blood transfusions.

Further down the road, Haitians will also likely suffer from secondary infections. With hospitals and clinics destroyed, people seeking help for broken bones and other survivable injuries will not be able to get help and will develop complications.

What will be the key medical focus in the immediate aftermath?
The focus is everything at once — to get people who are trapped out buildings at once, to get whatever first aid can be given to people who are injured, to get whatever treatment can be administered to as many people as possible.

Then, there's an added problem: Haiti has been very lawless for a long time. There are no reports of it yet in this disaster, but during the rescue efforts after hurricane Jeanne killed 3,000 people in 2004, aid workers were set upon by armed gangs, which are a constant presence in the country.
© 2010 msnbc.com  Reprints

[Josephus]

This'll turn out to be as big, if not bigger, an international relief operation than the Tsunami.
This will be the world's finest humanitarian hour.

I hope so. I just took out my credit card

And I've got no idea what Mihali was saying.

[lustindarkness]

Tim, thank you for the "uplifting and hopefull" article of hell on earth. I can only hope the best for them, but it seems it will only get worst before it gets any better.

[DisturbedPervert]

This will be the world's finest humanitarian hour.

I think you're forgetting New Orleans

[Fireblade]

Trinidad and Tobago: Trinidad and Tobago has committed an immediate relief aid package of 6.3 million Trinidad and Tobago Dollars (1 million USD).[citation needed]
China: The People's Republic of China sent a 60-member rescue team (National Earthquake Disaster Emergency Rescue Team) following the quake. The team consists of rescuers, medical personnel, experts, and three search dogs. The team left the following day from Beijing.[97][98] Red Cross Society of China will also offer assistance to Haiti.[99] Liu Xiangyang is the Vice Leader of Chinese Int'l Search & Rescue Team.[100] According to Xinhua News Agency, China will also donate $1 million to Haiti.

Damn, I hope China doesn't go broke with that massive aid package! 

[Syt]

Trinidad and Tobago: Trinidad and Tobago has committed an immediate relief aid package of 6.3 million Trinidad and Tobago Dollars (1 million USD).[citation needed]
China: The People's Republic of China sent a 60-member rescue team (National Earthquake Disaster Emergency Rescue Team) following the quake. The team consists of rescuers, medical personnel, experts, and three search dogs. The team left the following day from Beijing.[97][98] Red Cross Society of China will also offer assistance to Haiti.[99] Liu Xiangyang is the Vice Leader of Chinese Int'l Search & Rescue Team.[100] According to Xinhua News Agency, China will also donate $1 million to Haiti.

Damn, I hope China doesn't go broke with that massive aid package! 

According to a German news site Ted Turner will also dontae 1 million $. Germany will had over 1.5 million €.

[Mr.Penguin]

Trinidad and Tobago: Trinidad and Tobago has committed an immediate relief aid package of 6.3 million Trinidad and Tobago Dollars (1 million USD).[citation needed]
China: The People's Republic of China sent a 60-member rescue team (National Earthquake Disaster Emergency Rescue Team) following the quake. The team consists of rescuers, medical personnel, experts, and three search dogs. The team left the following day from Beijing.[97][98] Red Cross Society of China will also offer assistance to Haiti.[99] Liu Xiangyang is the Vice Leader of Chinese Int'l Search & Rescue Team.[100] According to Xinhua News Agency, China will also donate $1 million to Haiti.

Damn, I hope China doesn't go broke with that massive aid package! 

According to a German news site Ted Turner will also dontae 1 million $. Germany will had over 1.5 million €.

Denmark is donating 1.3 million € as immediately aid, more will follow soon...

[DisturbedPervert]

Damn, I hope China doesn't go broke with that massive aid package! 

Haiti recognizes Taiwan instead of Beijing, I'm surprised they got anything

[jimmy olsen]

1st person account by the AP man on the scene.

In Haiti, Tragedy, a Way of Life, Is Redefined

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/13/world/AP-CB-Surviving-Haiti.html?_r=1
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 13, 2010

Filed at 9:50 p.m. ET

EDITOR'S NOTE -- Jonathan M. Katz is The Associated Press' correspondent in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He filed this first-person account of the moments after Tuesday's earthquake, which has redefined tragedy for a nation that knows it all too well.

------

PETIONVILLE, Haiti (AP) -- I was sitting on my bed surfing the Internet when I noticed silence, followed by a weird groaning sound. I figured it was a passing water truck. But funny, I thought -- sounds more like an earthquake.

The house started shaking. Then it really started shaking. I walked out of my room and kneeled slowly to the undulating floor, laptop in hand, as windows, two years' worth of Haitian art and a picture of my grandfather smashed around me.

I was not hurt. Not only that, the staircase in the house where I live and work, while completely invisible behind a choking white cloud of drywall and dust, was still standing. I yelled out for Evens, the AP's all-in-one driver/translator/bodyguard here.

To my shock and delight he answered: ''Let's go.''

I went. Barefoot, over rocks, past a crack running the height of the house, out to the street in my underwear, first to look for a telephone to call in what had happened, then brave any aftershocks and return to the house for a chance at shoes and pants.

It's been nearly impossible to get an Internet or phone signal since then. So consider it my pure but well-founded speculation that many reports of the destruction of Port-au-Prince include a phrase like, ''Haiti is no stranger to suffering.''

In the wake of Tuesday's magnitude-7 earthquake, which leveled much of the Haitian capital and left perhaps tens of thousands dead, it is both an understatement and an overstatement.

Sure, Haiti is no stranger to suffering: For most people here, tragedy is more common than lunch. And yet this nation has never faced anything on such a cataclysmic scale.

Less than two years ago, the country's fourth-largest city, Gonaives, was left underwater by a limping tropical storm that would have barely disrupted traffic in Miami.

As our photographer and I came in on a raft with Brazilian soldiers, we passed bodies floating in the street. It was the third of four named storms to hit the country in the space of a month.

Barely two months later, a school fell down in the slum-and-mansion suburb of Petionville, and about 100 people died. The first sign was a noise that sounded like sirens coming from over the hill. They were the voices of screaming parents.

Here, passing a dead body in the streets after yet another storm or political coup merits little more than a passing comment about how properly the face has been covered.

Now we have to try to understand what it means that such a long history of pain pales next to the devastation wrought by 15 to 20 seconds of shaking one January afternoon.

Behind the now-bisected AP house is the same slum where that ill-fated school entered our nightmares two years ago. This time, every flimsy building had caved. The white cloud scratching my lungs hung across the horizon. And the screams were a screeching thunder.

The city is a ruin. Fuel, food and water are running in short supply. Mothers have lost their children. Children have lost their families. Entire neighborhoods are sleeping in the streets. People walk miles up and down mountains, carrying everything they own, with no real place to go.

But here is what is new: You have perhaps seen the pictures of the national palace smashed into a lurching heap over the grassy Champs de Mars. Or of the collapsed twin spires of the Notre Dame d'Haiti cathedral complex, which claimed the life of the archbishop. Or of the collapsed parliament where the senate president remained trapped Wednesday.

Imagine if nearly all the institutions in your life -- flawed, but still the only ones -- disappeared, all at once.

In a life where the next meal is uncertain, where the next rain may claim your home, where the next election may happen or not -- where that is the normal. Think of having those institutions smashed all around you.

At the very moment when you have lost someone, perhaps many people, you loved.

The AP house, a footnote in the devastation, is an uninhabitable mess on the verge of collapse. An entire city is screaming for help. I've finally logged onto the Internet long enough to see that some of those calls will be answered, at least in some way.

But what will happen after that help, like so much here, has vanished? Will there be an after?

[jimmy olsen]

Looks like another lost opportunity


http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/01/13/the_lost_haitian_revival

The lost Haitian revival
Posted By Annie Lowrey Wednesday, January 13, 2010 - 11:22 AM Share

As Mark Goldberg writes for the Daily Beast, Haiti just can't catch a break. The country, which has been through years of war and upheaval, and remains woefully poor, yesterday was hit with a massive earthquake which has caused critical damage to its major city and capital, Port-au-Prince. Casualties are expected to be massive, and as many as 3 of the country's 9 million citizens are without basic services. What makes it all sadder is that things had, just recently, seemed to be looking up.

Around 800,000 tourists traveled to Haiti last year -- a sizeable number for a small nation.  But 500,000 of them never ventured further than Royal Caribbean Cruise Line's heavily guarded man-made enclave on the northern shore of the island; therefore, they did little good for Haiti's economy. (Royal Caribbean apparently installs most of its own staff in Labadee, seen above, meaning fewer Haitians hired.)

Haitians as well as U.N. staff on the island were battling the country's image as a failing state, a murder and kidnapping capital. Its safety statistics are in fact in line with or lower than those in other Caribbean nations, after spiking in 2004 during the Aristide crisis.

Just last week, Comfort Inn announced it was planning on building a small hotel on the island. It would have been the only major international chain to have an outpost on Haiti. Additionally, via Tyler Cowen, Haiti was just one of two Caribbean countries expected to have GDP growth in 2010, of around 2.5 percent.

Image via RobinH00d on Flickr

.

[Slargos]

I love when people pat themselves on the back for just throwing up their hands and declaring the blatantly obvious: "This is the status quo!" 

No shit, people in North America and Europe would care more if this happened in a developed country.     This is not a very insightful or helpful contribution. 

And I do believe that the effort to attain some level of empathy for the suffering of even "third world" people is not reducible an exercise in PC guilt tripping or whatever else the self-declared realists of the privileged world would call it.

Tyr made a comment that was misinterpreted by Timmay, I clarified it for him. Shit storm ensued.

I love it when people jump into a situation without actually reading what's been said, and throw down their self-righteous anger and proceed to pat themselves on the back for a job well done.

Idiot.

[Slargos]

Stay classy, Slargos.

Seriously. I'm curious to hear how not caring about the fates of people on the other side of the globe constitutes racism.

I just want to point out that whilst I agreed with Slargos' original premise that ultimately the world doesn't give as much of a shit as if the same earthquake happens in New York or London; I do want to distance myself from everything else Slargos has said in this and probably other threads.

Thank you.

Judas.

Though it's a sad state of affairs when you should have to make such a statement. 

[jimmy olsen]

Looks like Anarchy is beginning to set in.

http://cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2010/01/13/gupta.haiti.quake.gunshots.cnn