PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A generous world has flooded Haiti with donations after its 7.0-magnitude earthquake last month, but anger and desperation are mounting as the aid stacks up inside this broken country.
Backups at key transportation points and scattered violence, including an armed group’s attack on a food convoy, have slowed the distribution of food and medicine from the port, airport and a warehouse in the Cite Soleil slum here in the capital.
U.S. air traffic controllers have lined up 2,550 incoming flights through March 1, but about 25 flights a day aren’t taking their slots. Communication breakdowns between Haitians and their foreign counterparts are common.
“Aid is bottlenecking at the Port-au-Prince airport. It’s not getting into the field,” said Mike O’Keefe, who runs Banyan Air Service in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Foreign aid workers and Haitians are frustrated. One Haitian father paid a group of men more than $200 on Tuesday to retrieve his daughter’s body from his collapsed house, rather than wait for demolition crews.
“No one is in charge,” said Dr. Rob Maddox of Start, La., tending to dozens of patients in the capital’s sprawling general hospital. “There’s no topdown leadership. … And since the Haitian government took control of our supplies, we have to wait for things even though they’re stacked up in the warehouse. The situation is just madness.”
Donors talk about five key logistical challenges — grappling with a nonfunctioning government, a backlog of flights at the airport, a damaged and small port, clogged overland routes from outlying airports and the Dominican Republic, and security concerns.
Aid agencies say food and water deliveries have about doubled in the past 10 days, but some relief workers are fed up about at how long it takes to move other supplies out of the U.N.’s warehouses.
U.N. officials said Tuesday that more than 100 ships are en route to Haiti, but part of the capital’s port remains unsound, with limited capacity. Ships need their own cranes and other offloading equipment.
Most aid convoys require armed escorts, like the one that fired guns to drive away 20 armed men who blocked a road Saturday and tried to hijack a food convoy from an airport to a southern town.
Mobs have also stolen food and looted goods from their neighbors in the camps, prompting many to band together or stay awake at night to prevent raids.
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