<p>I’m trained to go through, structurally evaluate, and red tag/yellow tag/green tag buildings. (This building’s safe and you can go in, this one’s not and by law you’re not allowed entry.) I just have to be deputized to do so by whatever local authority requires it. (Just required an afternoon course for people with structural engineering degrees, so it’s nothing too spectacular, but it’s darned useful.)</p>
<p>Going back and looking… they require fluent French or Creole, not just passable. Starting to doubt that they’ll take me, but I’ll e-mail my resume anyhow, if I get the go-ahead from our firm.</p>
<p>" It’s the opinion of experts who have spent their lives overseeing disaster relief or attempting to assist the basket case that is Haiti that you can’t feed millions of Haitians by dropping food and water into an environment where violence, lawlessness and government corruption were the norm long before the earthquake struck."</p>
<p>God, save us from the opinions of “experts.” Blindly following the experts causes more problems than it solves. But if it’s an expert you want, the retired Army general who praised the Navy’s dumping of supplies supposedly led the US military’s relief efforts in severall huge disasters, including Katrina.</p>
<p>Here are the types of “complications” that stall the experts into inaction:</p>
<p>A [given effort] won’t get aid to “everybody.”
The strong will take most of the aid from the weak.
It won’t have a lasting impact.
It’s not the most efficient use of our resources.
People won’t be lining up and receiving the supplies in an orderly fashion.</p>
<p>All of which are legit when you’ve got plenty of time, and are crap when lives are on the line. It’s like if your kid’s clothing catches fire and he’s rolling around on the ground, burning. You grab a bucket of water and throw it on him. Meanwhile Terwitt and MammaJ are standing there, doing nothing, and saying, “Look, only 20% of the water is hitting your son; why don’t you wait for the paramedics to arrive?; a bucket of water? he’s going to need months of attention in a hospital burn unit to fix this; a bucket doesn’t focus the water very well…why don’t you run down to the hardware store and buy a garden hose and hook it up to that faucet over there? Yeah, you might put out your son’s fire, but how about all the other burning kids in the world? What if that’s the last bucket of water you’ll be able to find?”</p>
<p>They have satellite TV and internet on the Navy ships. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if some of the commanders got tired of looking at press reports of zero aid getting to the people, all the while on their own ships they have helicopters, pilots, and big loads of food and water…and said F the checkoff lists, the transfer of assets forms in triplicate, the inventory control sheets and the permission of some United Nations bureaucrat, and told the helicopter crews to just take the stuff in and dump it wherever they could.</p>
<p>Your example has so many flaws in it (which makes it insulting that you presume I would behave that way), it’s not worth responding to. The orphanage that I referred to earlier ran out of water yesterday. We’re talking small children. They are cared for by two adults who cannot leave the children alone because word has gotten out that they did have some food at the orphanage and looters have been trying to scale the wall to get it. Do you really think the people picking up supplies from the drops are thinking about those children and are muddling through inaccessible streets and roadblocks to deliver what they picked up to them?</p>
<p>Kathiep - can you tell us what Dr. Farmer had to say?</p>
<p>Does anybody have any other resources to donate to, or updates as to what they’re personally doing to help? My skin just crawls that I have to sit here and wait, and having studied and attended a slew of seminars on appropriate disaster response, it’s <em>so</em> difficult to say what the right thing to do is. There are too many factors, too many unknowns in every disaster situation, and there are always thousands upon thousands of lessons learned in each of these situations, because something like this has never happened before.</p>
<p>Point fingers, but none of you, none of us, none of the experts, knows exactly what to do in these situations. We can’t, because each one is different, and there are so many layers of ethics, so many rocks and hard places, that it’s impossible to determine what is “right” and what is the “best use” of the resources.</p>
<p>I need to get onto a USAR team, wherever I end up…</p>
<p>aibarr - D2 had two years of French in college, and was able to pick up some information here and there from news reports that was spoken in Creole. What’s interesting, is that my grandmother (and all her siblings) spoke Creole in Louisiana and I always knew it had a strong French emphasis, but didn’t realize how close they were. But I also have heard many times that French is harder to pick up than Spanish.</p>
<p>I’m curious… when you’ve been trained for a disaster, and you can be used as a responder, at what point are you educated on various building codes, etc., in different countries. My guess is that many buildings in Haiti that weren’t even damaged wouldn’t even pass our codes, but do pass there. Do to their poor infrastructure to begin with, how would you know what should be condemned and what shouldn’t (not looking for specifics, but am wondering how or what point you are taught this)?</p>
<p>Thanks southjerseychessmom… will try to watch it later today (by the way… I’m just down the road from you today, helping D2 move into her dorm).</p>
<p>The more I read about PIH, the more I’m impressed, and embarassed to say I’d never heard of the organization. I also found out that they’re one of the organizations that H’s employer has made a rather large contribution to.</p>
<p>Teriwtt- is D moving back to 'berg today?
I wouldn’t have known much about PIH, until 10 days ago, when library happened to have this book which was listed by many Cc’ers on the “Best book I’ve read in the last 6 months thread”. I knew it was a book, on many college reading lists. </p>
<p>It’s an uplifting book, and I would recommend reading it now, even if you think you can’t handle much more despair, it really is inspiring and filled with hope.</p>
<p>I am going to climb on my soapbox a little bit - (I already donated money toward Haiti including PIH):</p>
<p>Folks - I don’t understand the criticizm of the US Military. None of the private organizations can do what they need to do without the help of the military. I don’t think that PIH has the capability to run the airport there. They don’t have heavy helo’s to air drop food, water and supplies. They certainly can’t provide their own security.
Schmaltz is making some good points - the US Navy, Marines, Air Force, Army and CG are all there on the ground doing what they can. There is one small airport, no control tower, they are working in very primitive conditions. MSF used the media to criticize the Air Force’s handling of the airport. They did get in with their inflatable hospital, later.
Even the 82nd Airborne had to circle for 5 hours before they could land.
The roads are gone so they are helo dropping supplies - how can anyone find fault with that?
Can everyone’s needs be served right now? No but they do what they can.
Violence is beginning and will spread. Thank goodness the military is there to help.</p>
<p>This is what really irks me - I saw Tracy Kidder in an interview - patting himself on the back and bashing the military. I saw an interview with Dr Farmer. He is overwhelmed and never experienced a disaster such as this. He is not a God, people. Don’t elevate him to that status and bash the rest.</p>
<p>The bottomline is to provide the best help - all organizations need to get on board and work together. One upsmanship has no place in this disaster.
Stepping off now.</p>
<p>There is no way that the buildings and infrastructure in Haiti would pass building codes here, no need to guess. We’re not looking to see if they would pass code, we’re just looking to see whether they would endanger anybody who entered.</p>
<p>The only thing we’re looking for with first-passes (“Rapid Evaluation” is what the first phase is called, and we do this as quickly as possible) is structural stability… whether or not people should go in. We look for patterns of cracking, we look for certain types of buildings which are more susceptible to damage, we look to see whether the entrances are stable. We look for falling hazards (unstable brick parapets over entrances, etc), buildings out-of-plumb, partial collapses, racking of the walls, things like that. Those all are unsafe. Then we post “Inspected” (green tag), “Limited Entry” (yellow tag), and “Unsafe” (red tag).</p>
<p>It really has nothing to do with local building codes, so this can be done all over the world. We’re looking at individual buildings, how all the buildings have behaved in general, and we’re applying general structural rules of behavior, taking into account that buildings may not be nearly as sturdy as we’re used to designing for. Honestly, most of the training that we get is from our college and graduate educations, as well as from our industry experience.</p>
<p>End FYI… Waiting for my boss’s boss to be done with his Monday morning meetings so I can go talk to him.</p>
<p>Supervisor gave me a very skeptical look and made a deal with me–if I can learn fluent French in the next 24 hours, he’ll let me go. That was two hours ago, so… I have 22 hours to learn French. <em>sigh</em>.</p>
<p>They likely wouldn’t have let me go anyhow, since they are indeed requiring that people speak fluent French or Creole in order to accompany the group that’s going, but I still wish I could have helped more in some way.</p>
<p>aibarr - maybe at some point in the future when they begin the rebuilding process there will be another project you can contribute to that doesn’t require its participants to be fluent.</p>
<p>On a lighter note, when you said you have 22 hours to learn French, my mind turned to an old I Love Lucy episode when she tried to learn Spanish when Ricky’s friends from Cuba were coming to visit. She used a small microphone in her ear with a translator stationed in the kitchen, telling her what to say… until he had to leave ubruptly. Then she was up a creek.</p>
<p>Yea! All the kids who were under the care of the two sisters in the BRESMA orphanage arrived at the Pittsburgh airport this morning (well, minus one who got lost, but one of the sisters stayed behind to find her, and they are on their way later today)!</p>
<p>I find myself checking the updates on the Lynn Univ. website a few times a day to see if they’ve had any luck finding the four students and two professors who are still missing. I’ve seen the parents of one of the girls on CNN every day pleading for help and my heart breaks for them. Still nothing as of this morning.</p>