Relief Groups Seek Alternative Routes to Get Aid Moving

15/01/2010

"Amid looting of United Nations and other food stocks in Haiti, international relief agencies struggled Friday to find alternative routes for aid in the face of survivors’ angry criticism that no help was getting through, threatening them with a second catastrophe after Tuesday’s earthquake.

With relief flights snarled at Port-au-Prince airport, officials at international aid organizations in Geneva and Rome said in telephone interviews that the likely alternatives included a land-and-air bridge between Port-au-Prince and Santo Domingo in the neighboring Dominican Republic and the deployment of roll-on, roll-off vessels capable of unloading supplies at the badly damaged port in the Haitian capital."

"Amid looting of United Nations and other food stocks in Haiti, international relief agencies struggled Friday to find alternative routes for aid in the face of survivors’ angry criticism that no help was getting through, threatening them with a second catastrophe after Tuesday’s earthquake.

With relief flights snarled at Port-au-Prince airport, officials at international aid organizations in Geneva and Rome said in telephone interviews that the likely alternatives included a land-and-air bridge between Port-au-Prince and Santo Domingo in the neighboring Dominican Republic and the deployment of roll-on, roll-off vessels capable of unloading supplies at the badly damaged port in the Haitian capital.

There were also reports of looting of food stocks in Port-au-Prince, according to Greg Barrow, a spokesman for the Rome-based United Nations World Food Program. The food relief agency says looting is not unusual in such crises. But a spokeswoman, Emilia Casella, said the agency did not know how much remained of its pre-quake stockpile of 15,000 tons of food aid in Port-au-Prince, The Associated Press reported.

She noted that regular food stores in the capital also “have been cleaned out” by desperate Haitians, the report said.

Three days after the quake, said Florian Westphal, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, “the time window is ever shrinking” for rescuers to locate the living among the debris in many areas of the capital. “But there’s still a possibility of finding survivors,” he said."

 

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