From a perplexed AP:
"Aid is bottlenecking at the Port-au-Prince airport. It's not getting into the field," said Mike O'Keefe, who runs Bayan Air Service in Fort Lauderdale.
Foreign aid workers and Haitians are fed up with waiting for help. One Haitian father paid a group of men more than $200 on Tuesday to retrieve his daughter's body from his collapsed house, rather than wait for demolition crews.
"No one is in charge," said Dr. Rob Maddox of Start, Louisiana, tending to dozens of patients in the capital's sprawling general hospital. "There's no topdown leadership. The Swiss don't want to cooperate with us. And since the Haitian government took control of our supplies, we have to wait for things even though they're stacked up in the warehouse. The situation is just madness."
Donors say the key logistical challenges are dealing with a backlog of supply flights at the airport, repairing and increasing the capacity of the city's piers and dealing with clogged overland routes from outlying airports and Dominican Republic. Most roads are just two lanes with many pot holes.
Some are also worried that isolated routes are vulnerable to ambush. Haiti is plagued with crime, violence and gangs.
Twenty armed men blocked a road and tried to hijack a convoy of food for earthquake victims Saturday, but were driven off by police gunfire, U.N. spokesman Vicenzo Pugliese said Tuesday."
The earthquake killed at least 150,000 and demolished virtually every government building in the capital. Approx. 1 million people are homeless, many huddling in crude tents of sticks and sheets. This continues to be a dangerous situation with painfully slow progress, and the Haitian govt. is woefully inadequate, yet in charge.
On Jan. 13, President Obama pledged $100 million of U.S. aid, plus our military's boots on the ground. It's perplexing how Obama's grand gesture hasn't magically opened the bottle necks to feed the hungry, heal the injured and avoid the indolent mismanagement of a 'boooshitler doesn't like Black people' debacle, like in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Isn't it?
