Haiti :: Focus on Hospitals -- Pest Management

Houston Businessman's New Mission in Haiti
Staff  KIAH
June 25, 2010

The Haitian camps are congested beyond imagination, with ramshackle tents standing edge to edge in every square foot of available space. With the rainy season now beginning, the crowded conditions and overtaxed public toilets have raised very real concerns about a cholera epidemic.


The tents themselves are a hodgepodge. Families' first attempts at fashioning shelters have been augmented with plastic sheeting supplied by international agencies. But the makeshift housing certainly won't withstand a hurricane. If one were to hit Port-au-Prince, the death toll can only be guessed at. There would be nowhere for displaced families to take refuge in a city where most of the hotels, public buildings, schools and churches still lie in massive heaps of rubble.

It's to be expected that cleaning up the rubble will take time. But what is shocking is that it hasn't really started. In four days of driving through this sprawling, heavily populated city recently, I saw only one backhoe in operation. It was repairing a sewer line. The other handful of modest cleanup efforts I saw were being done by teams of a dozen people with shovels and wheelbarrows, tools pitifully inadequate to the task.

Massive, aggressive intervention is required. It will take a convoy of construction equipment, such as that possessed by the U.S. military camped on the edge of the city, to remove the rubble and clear streets that are clogged with piles of concrete and iron. But the cleanup is just not happening.

Why has so little been accomplished? Why hasn't heavy equipment been brought in? Why hasn't the government depopulated at least some of the worst camps, moving residents to safer locations on the outskirts of the city where proper settlements can be planned, and proper shelters constructed?