George Clooney and Wyclef Jean have their hearts and minds in the right place. Both championed and created the "Hope For Haiti" Telethon that debuted tonight on HBO. I watched the show and was impressed with the number of TV and movie stars that donated their time and money to the cause. Common folks calling in donations but getting the phone answered by Julia Roberts, Steven Spielberg, Mel Gibson, etc. were impressed. No doubt MILLIONS will be donated.
Then tomorrow will come. The money will be contributed to major charity and relief organizations who will convert the cash into usable materials and food. All that stuff will then need to be delivered to the island nation of Haiti.
Haiti is one of the poorest nations on earth. Its poor people are known to eat mud cakes just to have something in their bellies. I know this because our church has a twin parish in Haiti. Take that poverty and add a very thin layer of social infrastructure in terms of electric power, gas and communications as well as fuel, and what you have is a little crust of a society that can be broken with a strong wind. Much less a 7.0 earthquake.
Despite politics, people are sympathetic to anything that puts children at risk. Images of little children being rescued from collapsed buildings will immediately interest anyone who has had a kid of their own (and rightly so!). Our humanity is called to action! Many nations have sent medical and rescue teams to Haiti to save victims. Companies, including my own employer, DHL, have sent Disaster Response Teams to help with the efforts. For the most part, these are very brave volunteer forces.
Lets break down what needs to happen. The Port au Prince airport normally handles about 35 flights a day. The American aircraft carrier, USS Carl Vinson is now near shore and with her Navy air traffic controllers as well as USAF controllers, inbound flights are up to 100 per day. The inbound freight is staged in the open air, which is a risk, but it's on the ground, which is at least a positive. Canadian forces are working to open a second airport at Jacmel but the time table to get that organized is not firm. Port infrastructure at the port of Port au Prince was heavily damaged in the quake, with the container cranes there being knocked off their rail mounts or knocked over. The US Navy is engineering the reopening of the port now to allow relief aid to enter the country.
There is no aviation fuel on the island. This means that inbound flights must have at least enough fuel to redeploy to a near by airport. The crux of this is that an airplane that has to carry extra fuel to repatriate to another country can carry less in the way of relief goods. For this reason the United States has set up a staging base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. For more nefarious reasons, the world at least knows exactly where Gitmo is. I suspect Miami, San Juan and perhaps airports in Cuba and other Caribbean nations will serve similar roles.
Given the tactical nature of this rescue effort, I think the hero of the campaign will be the venerable C-130, which has been ideally suited to tactical materiel delivery since the 1950's.
Once goods are on the ground, the key will be how efficiently they are distributed to those who need them. This is an area where I feel our industry has expertise to share. Shipping lines, airlines, trucking companies, contract logistics (warehousing and TMS) firms all have expertise gained by handling the worlds global commerce can help Haiti. Haiti has no distribution network. For this reason a green field opportunity exists to put this little impoverished nation on a new footing.
The world will provide Haiti with billions of dollars in assets and infrastructure it would never have had access to before this earthquake. Despite its chronic poverty, Hollywood stars weren't concerned with Haiti until it hit a world stage. For this reason I take at least some of the "stars" with a big grain of salt. In my opinion however, Wyclef Jean is a Haitian patriot. He stands for his countrymen as a voice in the west.
It will take years and many global dollars, but I wonder in the end, if this earthquake will not turn out to be a blessing of sorts for the nation of Haiti? Many of her citizens have perished tragically, but I can think of no other event that might have pushed the worlds "first world" countries to be so forceful in helping the least of the third world.
Almost assuredly, the Hollywood movie stars had their minds on other things...as did we all.
Eric
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