Cuba allows US to use airspace for Haiti
Sydney Morning Herald
Jan 16
The United States says it’s been granted rare permission to use Cuban airspace for aid and evacuation flights in the wake of Haiti’s devastating earthquake.
“We have coordinated with the Cuban government for authorisation to fly medical evacuation flights from the US Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to Miami, Florida, through Cuban airspace, cutting 90 minutes off one-way flight time,” the White House said in a statement on Friday.
The deal will allow US planes to overfly Cuba en route to and from Guantanamo, which is perched on the communist island’s southeastern tip.
CARICOM BLOCKED
…as US takes control of airport
Rickey Singh Barbados
Trinidad News
Jan 17
THE CARIBBEAN Community’s emergency aid mission to Haiti, comprising Heads of Government and leading technical officials, failed to secure permission Friday to land at that devastated country’s airport, now under the control of the United States.
Consequently, the Caricom ‘assessment mission’ that was to determine priority humanitarian needs resulting from the mind-boggling earthquake disaster of Haiti last Tuesday, had to travel back from Jamaica to their respective home destinations..
On Friday afternoon the US State Department confirmed signing two ‘Memoranda of Understanding’ with the Government of Haiti that made ‘official that the United States is in charge of all inbound and outbound flights and aid off-loading…’
TCI unites to help earthquake victims
Turks and Caicos Weekly News
COMPASSIONATE residents across the country have leapt into action to support their Haitian neighbours following Tuesday’s devastating earthquake.
Schools, hospitals, landmarks and homes were all wiped out in the blink of an eye leaving millions of grief-stricken survivors homeless and hungry.
Back in the TCI, after passing unscathed through a brief precautionary tsunami alert, offers rolled in of assistance, money and donations.
And just days later rescue and aid teams are poised to jet over to the scene of the quake.
On Wednesday Governor Gordon Wetherell pledged his complete support to international relief efforts.
Earthquake in Haiti Shattered Efforts to Restore Resources, Boost Agriculture
NYT
Greenwire
Jan 18
UNITED NATIONS — One week ago, Haiti’s biggest fears were hurricanes and food shortage.
But authorities were preparing for them. With law and order restored by international peacekeepers, thousands of Haitians were put to work building flood protections and establishing urban gardens. Experimental efforts to reforest hillsides denuded by the poor seeking wood for charcoal were gaining momentum. And U.N. officials were cautiously optimistic their Haitian enterprise could rank among their most successful.
But it all crashed down in the devastating earthquake last Tuesday.
Work on restoring Haitian forests has been suspended, perhaps indefinitely. Water supplies throughout the nation will have to be reassessed, and funding for food production and storm protection is now threatened as international attention is turned to meeting Haiti’s desperate emergency needs.
Adventures in Life: The life and times of two Americans in Haiti: the celebrated, the inspired, the frustrated, and all that lies in between.
Their Jan 14 entry about the earthquake aftermath is excellent.
Translating David Brooks
by Matt Taibbi
Jan 18
A friend of mine sent a link to Sunday’s David Brooks column on Haiti, a genuinely beautiful piece of occasional literature. Not many writers would have the courage to use a tragic event like a 50,000-fatality earthquake to volubly address the problem of nonwhite laziness and why it sometimes makes natural disasters seem timely, but then again, David Brooks isn’t just any writer.
Rather than go through the Brooks piece line by line, I figured I’d just excerpt a few bits here and there and provide the Cliff’s Notes translation at the end. It’s really sort of a masterpiece of cultural signaling — if you live anywhere between 59th st and about 105th, you can hear the between-the-lines messages with dog-whistle clarity.
Dr. Bill’s Solution Could Provide Food and Water to the Desperate Haitians
KGO
Jan 19
(excerpt)
There is also an easy way to provide basic sanitation to those living in camps and on the ground in crowed areas. Without this, the refugees are soon forced to walk and sleep in filth that rapidly spreads disease. Dropping Food Packages Without Parachutes Scattering Over Large Areas Thousands of starving people in Haiti can be saved if we move quickly to do the obvious. It is not too late to begin dropping food packages without parachutes all over Haiti. Our military has millions of MRE food packages in east coast warehouses. They have cargo planes in Florida to deliver the packages – the same planes we used in Bosnia and Afghanistan.
Haiti is only an hour away for these planes. We showed in Bosnia (1993) and Afghanistan (2001) that most food packages in plastic wrapping and military MRE packages will not break up on hitting the ground because terminal air velocity limits the speed at which the packages hit the ground no matter what height from which the packages are dropped. No one was ever hurt by a falling package, but tens of thousands picked up food from heaven.
How in the world the so-called relief agencies and the government officials can forget what was done is beyond belief. Major food companies will contribute millions of energy bars, Granola bars, dried fruit in plastic packages, etc., to go along with the Military MREs that should be used immediately. It took only two cold calls to Quake Oats Co. in 1993 to get them to contribute the 100,000 Granola Bars we dropped over Bosnia. They want the good publicity of a dramatic air drop. They donE28099t get that by simply contributing to a food stockpile that will not be utilized until the next crisis. How to Drop Water Bottles Safely The press and officials are wringing their hands over the other major danger festering right now. The people in Haiti have no clean water at the worst possible time. And the relief administrators do not want to use helicopters to deliver water or food to outlying areas that the trucks can not reach. If helicopters land, they are mobbed before they can unload their supplies. And they fear that plastic water bottles will break if dropped from height — or hurt people. But, again, they are horribly ignorant of what has been done successfully in past crises. There is a solution that they ignore A group of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists showed FEMA how to deliver bottled water safely to refugees on the ground at the end of the New Orleans crisis. Simply drop the plastic bottles from a height of no more than a few hundred feet and away from people or drop the bottles into water anywhere that refugees on the ground can swim, such as pools, lakes, etc. We did the experiment to show FEMA that the bottles do not break when they hit the ground and that they float in water with their tops clearly visible. Thirsty and desperate people will get them. The canals around New Orleans were ideal drop zones
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