On an ordinary day, three aircraft might take off and land at Haiti's main airport. Less than a week after earthquake relief operations began in Haiti, hundreds of aircraft ferrying aid workers and supplies have cycled through Port-au-Prince.
*Join Reddit’s Haiti relief fundraising drive with Direct Relief International.*Not long after a massive earthquake struck Haiti on Jan. 12, U.S. Air Force Special operations teams arrived to reopen the airport. American Forces Press Service, quoting Col. Buck Elton, the Air Force commander overseeing flights at Port-au-Prince, reported yesterday that the Air Force has since then directed over 600 takeoffs and landings from the 10,000-foot airstrip.
Over the weekend, soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division's 1st Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment began arriving in Haiti; they set up camp on the grounds of an abandoned and damaged country club near the U.S. Embassy. On Saturday, the hospital ship USNS Comfort set sail on a short-notice humanitarian deployment to Haiti. According to American Forces Press Service, the ship is due to arrive in Port-au-Prince on Jan. 21. While en route, the hospital ship is supposed to receive an additional 350 medical personnel and support staff, which will boost the number of operating rooms available.
For some great up-to-the minute snapshots, I've been following tweets by U.K. Guardian correspondent Ed Pilkington. A few hours ago, he spotted the first, rudimentary signs of rebuilding: Two men rebuilding a collapsed wall. But he also captures some of the tension on the streets. "Some of most tense scenes in #Haiti r in petrol stations, hundreds jostling to fill their cans," he tweets. The New York Times' The Lede blog, as always, is doing a bang-up job of supplementing the dispatches from reporters in the field.
My friends Kira Kay and Jason Maloney, who had been filming a documentary in Haiti when the earthquake struck, made it out on Saturday on an Air Force C-130 flight to Homestead Air Force Base, Fla. It looks like it was a tough decision to leave. "One really had the impression there were more media on the ground than aid workers and as mentioned resources rapidly diminishing," they tweeted on Jan. 16. "Then again, more coverage = more aid. How to strike the balance?"
[PHOTO: U.S. Department of Defense]
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