Strategic Briefer and author, Tom Barnett brings to the front the natural human capacity to over emphasize a bad situation for newsworthiness.
January 24, 2010
Comment upgrade: More Haiti dataA couple of days ago, I cited two WAPO pieces that suggested Haiti was dissolving into lawlessness (not uncommon after a major disaster--looting, vigilantism and score-settling all tend to pop up to some degree after a System Perturbation of this magnitude).
To counter this impression, reader Shane Deichman relays an email from Eric Rasmussen, CEO of inSTEDD, an IT-focused group that works to improve post-disaster management. The electronic missive presents an on-the-ground perspective highly at odds with WAPO's reporting (and my post's too-enthusiastic amplification). I'm almost certain I know Eric from a past life (he was Navy for a long time), because his name is quite familiar.
Anyway, here's what Eric wrote in a broadcast email:
Friends,
I've just returned from driving all over PaP. We stopped and talked. We were in the national park, the palace grounds, up in Delmas, and around the airport. The place is calm, sad, and massively under-resourced. That is no surprise - we're ramping up - but there is an important issue skewing the response a little.
In more than two hours of assessment, I saw two SAR teams and one water truck. I was in the hardest hit areas. No food aid visible. One water truck. The rumor is that security - a force protection requirement - is impeding aid delivery.
If there are security concerns I'm not sure what is driving them. There are isolated incidents, but Port au Prince is a city of more than 1.2 million. Delmas has more than 400,000. There is going to be crime, stupid people, angry people, but they're isolated. This is an impressively controlled crowd and they are TRYING to be well-behaved so that aid will flow. There are more than 20,000 in the Palace Park alone. They fully recognize the risk if they tolerate violence.
My driver offered to wrap every medical worker in 5 Haitians to make sure they'd feel safe.
I saw untreated open fractures. Obvious head trauma. Obvious psych trauma. Major avulsions. No medical surveys evident on the street. Hospital clearly overloaded. I have photographs.
Can we please ensure that we avoid looking like we're hiding from poor, weak, injured people who need help? The perceived security posture is getting quite a bit of play in the community and may not serve anyone well. The transcript below is locally discussed. As it happens I know Chris Elias, CEO of PATH, and he hires good people. I suspect the interview content is accurate.
Eric
What is the exact truth? Both descriptions may hold, depending on exact location and time (the doc's impressions are based on a two-hour tour), but Rasmussen's experienced eye suggests that WAPO's reporting was too extrapolating. Still, note that the pivot on his logic is a "rumor," so you don't want to replace one bad extrapolation with another (as simpler reasons for slow aid-flow are easily imagined). You just want to balance your perceptions suitably until better, more compelling data accumulates.
Remember, we live in a MSM world where the election of one senator from MA is described as an "earthquake" creating "chaos" within Congress! So hyperbole tends to rule, and my mistake was in passing it on too uncritically.
Update: Team Rubicon Internal Medicine Dr Maurecio Consalter helps set up Forward Area Surgical Teams (FAST). Security elements led by Jake Wood, Clay Hunt and William McNulty, will insert FAST teams into refugee camps in the next hour. "We are going to do field trauma, surgeries, debride wounds...if there is a natural delivery we will do it, and we are going to triage tertiary care to CDTI Hospital" says Consalter.
Doc Mark, with Mobile Team Alpha, removes a cast to find a badly infected wound.
Former Army medic Zak Beck reinforces a previously used cast with Dermafill pens and duct tape. 
