This is heartbreaking to hear. I know there is an entire industry ready to answer the call for security needs, and we will. It’s just the flood gates need to be opened, much like they were opened during Katrina, to get the ball going. Eventually, NGOs and the like will figure it out that they actually need folks like us in order to accomplish their mission. And as the Belgian doctors are figuring out, you can’t depend on others for security, you have to insure your operation has it, and that takes planning and initiative. It also takes putting away your ego and your misconceptions about folks like us, and rationally figuring out how to use us for your operation. And from the sounds of it, at least the media had private security with them. (bravo to the team that is protecting Dr. Sanja Gupta and his crew)
And now that the U.S. Military has committed to this disaster with a heavy duty response, I wonder about our current strategic needs to protect the homeland or staff our other ‘projects’? Two wars, and now this major disaster that will require a long term military presence, will certainly put the military in a less flexible stance. How could it not?
So with that said, one would have to expect that security contractors, as well as other contractor types, will more than likely make up the difference. We will keep our eye on this, and this industry will certainly answer the call, like we always do.
I just hope that those that are reading this, and just entering this game called security contracting, understand that Jundism will be vital for you and your contract, in order to make our contribution to the war and these disasters, honorable and essential. –Matt
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Security concerns cause doctors to leave hospital, quake victims
January 16, 2010
Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) — Earthquake victims, writhing in pain and grasping at life, watched doctors and nurses walk away from a field hospital Friday night after a Belgian medical team evacuated the area, saying it was concerned about security.
The decision left CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta as the only doctor at the hospital to get the patients through the night.
CNN initially reported, based on conversations with some of the doctors, that the United Nations ordered the Belgian First Aid and Support Team to evacuate. However, Belgian Chief Coordinator Geert Gijs, a doctor who was at the hospital with 60 Belgian medical personnel, said it was his decision to pull the team out for the night. Gijs said he requested U.N. security personnel to staff the hospital overnight, but was told that peacekeepers would only be able to evacuate the team.
He said it was a “tough decision” but that he accepted the U.N. offer to evacuate after a Canadian medical team, also at the hospital with Canadian security officers, left the site Friday afternoon. The Belgian team returned Saturday morning.
Gijs said the United Nations has agreed to provide security for Saturday night. The team has requested the Belgian government to send its own troops for the field hospital, which Gijs expects to arrive late Sunday.
Responding to the CNN report that Gupta was the only doctor left at the Port-au-Prince field hospital, U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said Saturday that the world body’s mission in Haiti did not order any medical team to leave. If the team left, it was at the request of their own organization, he said.
Edmond Mulet, the U.N. assistant secretary general for peacekeeping operations, told reporters later that local security officers deemed the makeshift hospital unsafe.
“It seems that we’ve heard some reports in the international media that the United Nations asked or forced some medical teams to not work any more in some clinic — that is not true, that is completely untrue,” Mulet said Saturday.
CNN video from the scene Friday night shows the Belgian team packing up its supplies and leaving with an escort of blue-helmeted U.N. peacekeepers in marked trucks.
Gupta — assisted by other CNN staffers, security personnel and at least one Haitian nurse who refused to leave — assessed the needs of the 25 patients, but there was little they could do without supplies.
More people, some in critical condition, were trickling in late Friday.
“I’ve never been in a situation like this. This is quite ridiculous,” Gupta said.
With a dearth of medical facilities in Haiti’s capital, ambulances had nowhere else to take patients, some of whom had suffered severe trauma — amputations and head injuries — under the rubble. Others had suffered a great deal of blood loss, but there were no blood supplies left at the clinic.
Gupta feared that some would not survive the night.
He and the others stayed with the injured all night, after the medical team had left and after the generators gave out and the tents turned pitch black.
Gupta monitored patients’ vital signs, administered painkillers and continued intravenous drips. He stabilized three new patients in critical condition.
At 3:45 a.m., he posted a message on Twitter: “pulling all nighter at haiti field hosp. lots of work, but all patients stable. turned my crew into a crack med team tonight.”
He said the Belgian doctors did not want to leave their patients behind but were ordered out by the United Nations, which sent buses to transport them.
“There is concern about riots not far from here — and this is part of the problem,” Gupta said.
There have been scattered reports of violence throughout the capital.
“What is striking to me as a physician is that patients who just had surgery, patients who are critically ill, are essentially being left here, nobody to care for them,” Gupta said.
Sandra Pierre, a Haitian who has been helping at the makeshift hospital, said the medical staff took most of the supplies with them.
“All the doctors, all the nurses are gone,” she said. “They are expected to be back tomorrow. They had no plan on leaving tonight. It was an order that came suddenly.”
She told Gupta, “It’s just you.”
A 7.0 magnitude earthquake flattened Haiti’s capital city Tuesday afternoon, affecting as many as 3 million people as it fanned out across the island nation. Tens of thousands of people are feared dead.
Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, lacked adequate medical resources even before the disaster and has been struggling this week to tend to huge numbers of injured. The clinic, set up under several tents, was a godsend to the few who were lucky to have been brought there.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who led relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said the evacuation of the clinic’s medical staff was unforgivable.
“Search and rescue must trump security,” Honoré said. “I’ve never seen anything like this before in my life. They need to man up and get back in there.”
Honoré drew parallels between the tragedy in New Orleans, Louisiana, and in Port-au-Prince. But even in the chaos of Katrina, he said, he had never seen medical staff walk away.
“I find this astonishing these doctors left,” he said. “People are scared of the poor.”
CNN’s Justine Redman, Danielle Dellorto and John Bonifield contributed to this report.
Story here.
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Stalling relief effort sparks violence
PORT AU PRINCE
January 18, 2010
WHILE countries and relief agencies have showered aid on Haiti, little of it is reaching increasingly desperate Haitians who lack food, clean water or shelter.
Reports of intensifying looting and violence have increased, particularly around aid distribution points.
The worst violence to date broke out in a warehouse district in central Port-au-Prince, where at least 1000 rioters with makeshift weapons fought over whatever goods they could loot from shuttered houses and shops. Witnesses said the police departed as things got worse.
UN peacekeepers patrolling the capital said frustrations were rising and warned aid convoys to guard against looting. Yet despite the tensions, survivors lined up patiently at other UN food and water distribution centres.
In one particularly shocking incident, a looter was spotted hauling a corpse from a coffin at a cemetery so he could drive away with the wooden box. There were also reports of armed gangs setting up roadblocks to demand money and supplies from passing trucks.
The UN last night released graphic photographs of a lynch mob burning alive a man accused of robbery.
Fred Lavaud, who works on President Rene Preval’s security detail, described scenes of women who had received food being assaulted. ”The problem is there’s no control,” he said. ”And people are desperate.”
The problems, aid officials say, stem in part from the best of intentions. Countries around the world have responded to Haiti’s call for help as never before. And they are flooding the country with supplies and relief workers that its collapsed infrastructure and non-functioning government are in no position to handle.
Haitian officials instead are relying on the United States and the United Nations, but co-ordination is posing a critical challenge, aid workers said. An airport hobbled by only one runway, a ruined port whose main pier splintered into the ocean, roads blocked by rubble, widespread fuel shortages and a lack of drivers to move the aid into the city are compounding the problems.
Across Port-au-Prince, hunger and thirst were on the rise. ”We see all the commotion, but we still have nothing to drink,” said Joel Querette, 23, a college student camped out in a park. ”The trucks are going by.”
About 1700 people camped on the grass in front of the prime minister’s office in the Petionville neighbourhood, pleading for biscuits and water-purification tablets distributed by aid groups. Haitian officials said tens of thousands of victims had already been buried. A preliminary Red Cross estimate put the total number of affected people at 3.5 million. President Barack Obama announced that former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton would lead a national drive to raise money to help the survivors.
”Presidents Bush and Clinton will help the American people to do their part, because responding to disaster is the work of all of us,” he said.
Even as the US took a leading role in aid efforts, some aid officials were accusing US officials of focusing their efforts on getting their people and troops installed and getting their citizens out. The US is managing air traffic control at the airport, helicopters are flying relief missions from warships off the coast, and about 10,000 troops are expected to arrive by today to help with the relief effort.
The World Food Program was finally able to land planes with food, medicine and water on Saturday, after failing on Thursday and Friday, an official with the agency said. Those flights had been diverted so that the US could land troops and equipment, and fly Americans and other foreigners to safety.
”There are 200 flights going in and out every day, which is an incredible amount for a country like Haiti,” said Jarry Emmanuel, the air logistics officer for the agency’s Haiti effort. ”But most of those flights are for the United States military.”
He added: ”Their priorities are to secure the country. Ours are to feed. We have got to get those priorities in sync.”
Some aid workers were critical of the United Nations, as well, arguing that the agency had the most on-the-ground experience in Haiti and should be directing efforts better.
But a large number UN employees were killed in the earthquake or remain missing.
Story here.