The extent of the devastation in Port-au-Prince, the incapacity of the already weak Haitian government, and the degraded state of infrastructure throughout the country resist comparison to any disaster before this one. But post-recovery evaluations from the Asian tsunami, the Bam earthquake and other disasters suggest which practices allow relief efforts to work effectively and which result in waste and delays.
My piece on Forbes.com puts the response to Haiti’s earthquake in the context of previous disaster relief efforts. Read it here.
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A comprehensive set of lessons, drawing from 30 earthquake responses, is available from the ALNAP website: http://www.alnap.org/pool/files/ALNAPLessonsEarthquakes.pdf
Your comments about local response make me wonder why no one is talking about the response of the DR? What are they doing? They are, after all, on the other side of the island….
Excuse me Jeff. I´m from the Dominican Republic (and recurrent reader of this blog I might add) and currently living in the DR. I can assure you my country has been helping Haiti from day one. There has been help in many ways: people from this country have been collecting water, food, medicine since TUESDAY NIGHT. Doctors from my country are currently being sent to the cities near the border to help attend those Haitians in need. In fact, Haitian president Rene Preval has admitted this publicly (http://www.diariodigital.com.do/articulo,49061,html, link in Spanish)
I´m not trying to be apologetic towards the DR for the sake of it; I´m doing it because there was this Spaniard newspaper that slandered the DR a few days after the earthquake.
Ray, thanks for speaking up. As usual, the US press has not covered this aspect of the story and I think most people here think Haiti is an island unto itself. It also makes me wonder why more of the international effort is not going through the DR….
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