Haiti airport full; relief/rescue flights can't land

[itsrobert]

Good news/bad news. The response has been overwhelming, but flights are being turned away because of it. They need to expand the airport somehow.

[SoCalDem]

1. This is the downside of massive relief efforts

The infrastructure won't support all the extras.. They need to drop & go..and have as few on-the-ground coordinators as possible..

It also "looks bad" when the helpers who fly in, have food & water and the locals don't.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

2. Just coordinating this stuff has got to be a nightmare.

With a ton of different aid agencies and no central control telling them where they need to go or what they should expect to do when they get there, it's inevitable that this sort of stuff will happen. It also doesn't help that the disaster area is geographically quite small and extremely dense with broken stuff. It probably also doesn't help that Haiti doesn't seem to have much in the way of a functioning government at the moment.

[PacerLJ35]

8. USAF sent in a Special Tactics Team yesterday

These guys are experts in running unimproved airfield ops and managing inbound airlift...we deal with them often when operating out of LZs and DZs (Landing Zones and Drop Zones).

[laughingliberal]

3. There is a representative in NY (didn't catch his name) trying to get nurses on some of the ships

going in. He was on the conference call with RNRN this morning who is working to get nurses in as quickly as possible.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

4. How about the DR?

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

5. Dunno what the logistics of that would look like.

Is there a closer airport than Santo Domingo? How long does it take to drive from there to the disaster area?

[DevonRex]

6. They said 8 hours or so on dirt roads through the mountains. That

was on CNN yesterday. I haven't fact checked it myself.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

7. No idea.

The island's a few hundred miles long. It'd be a matter of hours if the roads were clear.

I don't know the condition of the roads. But I imagine there must be enough excavation and construction equipment in the DR to get them passable at least for emergency trucks in a short amount of time. It'd probably need some sort of policing force to control the traffic though.

Material will be coming in huge amounts over the next several weeks and months. If the Port-Au-Prince airport is already backed up, I'd expect a huge amount to be coming from the DR.