An Airman with the 118th Civil Engineering Squadron, gives candy to a child at the New Life Children's Home in Port au Prince, Haiti, March 12, 2010. Members of the squadron have been working at the home, a local orphanage that has also taken in many children injured by the January earthquake, building cabinets, storage areas and a medical clinic. Photo by Staff Sgt. Jon Soucy

The U.S. military response to the January earthquake in Haiti was almost immediate.

Within hours, equipment, supplies and personnel began to arrive in Haiti to assist those affected by the earthquake and its aftershocks.

Many Air National Guard units and personnel were among the first to respond to the disaster.

For some, it was a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Air Force Staff Sgt. Oscar Trevino of the 190th Civil Engineering Squadron of the Kansas Air National Guard was with his unit in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as part of its two weeks of annual training.

“People said they felt the earthquake,” said Trevino. “I grew up in Southern California, and I didn’t feel anything. I just rolled over and went to bed. Sure enough, we found out the next day they had a massive earthquake over here.”

Trevino’s unit arrived here a week later.

“We waited for a week to get transportation,” he said. “Really, they needed us as soon as they could so we could get the camp going and get the other people housed.”

When Trevino first arrived in Haiti, service members were sleeping wherever space was available.

“The first week I slept on some lumber, because I didn’t want to sleep on the ground,” he said.

Building a tent city is a bit more involved than simply erecting a few tents. It means leveling ground and setting up living, shower and laundry areas.

“We initially brought in what is called a ’550 kit,’ which consists of tents and will house roughly 550 personnel,” said Trevino. “We were at the north end of the airport, and it was nothing but tall grass. And we came in with our heavy equipment and leveled the place. We put up tents and then our shower and laundry and built it up to as you see it today.”

These operations are all part of what a civil engineering squadron does.

“When we hit the ground in an expeditionary or contingency environment, our job is to set up a bare base,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Craig Bradford, commander of the 118th CES in Nashville, Tenn., and commander of the 24th Expeditionary CES in Port au Prince, Haiti. “So, if we have a water source and an airfield, we’ll come in and bring in all the material to build a tent city.”

But that still means hitting the ground running.

“We got here Jan. 29, and I haven’t had a day off since then,” said Bradford. “But we’ve been working hard to build a tent city for all the joint members in the task force.”

Members of Bradford’s squadron have been responsible for building more than a tent city. They worked on other projects around the airport and were directly involved with getting it re-opened to commercial traffic on Feb. 19.

“We built a diversionary road around the airport, otherwise traffic would be worse than what it already is,” said Bradford. “We also fixed a water leak that was just outside the major terminal that was going to be used for the commercial re-opening. Without our work, that terminal would not have opened at all.”

They also fixed the landing lights on the runway.

“The airfield lighting has gone down multiple times while we’ve been here,” said Bradford. “The first night it happened, the president of Haiti couldn’t even make it in. They had to divert his flight to another Caribbean island and our folks stayed up until that system was working and ready to go and he landed in the morning.”

The squadron’s ability to get the airfield lights back up and operational came about, in part, because of the civilian backgrounds of many of the squadron members.

“From the civil engineering standpoint, most of our folks are craftsmen on the outside,” said Bradford. “They have the abilities and they are working in the crafts. They’re carpenters, they’re electricians. Those are some of the unique qualities that the active duty force doesn’t have that we bring in our squadron.”

Because many buildings within the city have been destroyed or damaged by the earthquake, local residents have been wary of returning to their homes or entering various structures, said Bradford.

So, the squadron provided structural assessments of those properties “to give people the warm and fuzzy that they can go back and live where they lived before and that’s just as important as providing food and water,” said Bradford.

Providing these services is what makes the mission worthwhile. “Morale has been fantastic,” said Bradford. “This is a different sort of mission than going to Iraq or Afghanistan. If the shops can afford to lose a few folks during the week, then we go ahead and send them out on a mission to help an orphanage or work in the clinic or wherever we can.”

And that’s all part of the squadron’s mission.

“There was a humanitarian mission before the earthquake and there will be one long after,” said Bradford. “At most, we can put a dent in it. We’re here to help as much as we can.”

DVIDS
Story by Staff Sgt. Jon Soucy

Please follow the links for the complete story:

Haitians Go Back to Work
Story by Pfc. Kissta Feldner

Locals sit by their stands, filled with everything from rice, to cigarettes, to Revlon lipstick. Men carry enormous bags of fruits and vegetables on their heads, zigzagging through the maze that makes up the “orange market.” It was dubbed this by the U.S. soldiers in the area because of the massive amount of oranges that lay in piles by the side of the road, waiting to be peeled by Haitian women, stuffed into plastic bags, and sold to locals as they walk the streets.

The market is a bustling place, as are the areas of Port-au-Prince where vendors fill the streets, selling second-hand clothing, beautiful paintings and hand-carved wooden sculptures. Seven weeks after the earthquake that devastated Haiti’s capital, and life is ever so slowly returning to normal.

Many citizens have spent these few weeks cleaning and restoring their places of business, just wanting to get back to work and restore some normalcy to their daily routine after the traumatic events following the disaster.

---

Medics from the Colombian army and air force are working side by side with U.S. Army, Air Force, and Navy doctors at an intermediate aftercare facility in Port-au-Prince. They are in here to assist with the ongoing humanitarian aid their country is providing to the people of Haiti Feb. 27. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Richard Andrade)

Wave of Colombian Medics Arrive in Haiti

Medics from the Colombian army and the air force are working side by side with U.S. Army, Air Force, and Navy doctors at an intermediate aftercare facility in Port-au-Prince.

The fact that the IAF is so close to the port makes it easy for the medics to transport patients to and from the USNS Comfort.

Columbian army Col. Pedro Segura arrived to assist with the ongoing humanitarian aid their country is providing to the people of Haiti Feb. 27. He is in charge of the Columbian contingency that is in Port-au-Prince working with U.S. forces.

“We will be in Haiti as long as it takes,” said Segura.

“We will do our best to collaborate with the U.S. forces to help the people of Haiti,” he said.

The Colombian Red Cross is also in Haiti, handing out water, first aid kits and hand crank radios at many food distribution points. The newly arrived medics are eager to be part of the Haitian mission.

---

Red Cross vaccination program

As the vaccination posts are installed, the Red Cross gently reminds people that by vaccinating themselves and their children, they are fighting back against the extreme vulnerability into which the earthquake threw them.

“We have done everything we can to support our community,” says Noel Ylmond, leader of Villambetta’s displaced.

“Our priority has been to put children first from the very beginning. But it’s difficult for people to accept that when other priorities seem more pressing.

“These children are our hope, our future”.

Five vaccination teams have been operational since 8 February, vaccinating as many as 10,000 in a single day.

The vaccination consists of five different components: measles, diptheria, pertussis and tetanus, as well as albendezol – a deworming agent – and vitamin A.

“We still have 50,000 more people to vaccinate,” says Dr. Guilbert, a former professor at the university medical faculty and the nurses school, both destroyed in the earthquake.

---

Floods come to Haiti two months early

Thirteen dead. Submerged houses. Fields and banana plantations waterlogged. Drowned livestock. Impassable roads. Fresh trauma for quake-displaced thousands. This is the plight of Les Cayes, a city on Haiti’s south coast, after an unseasonal deluge. And hurricane season is not far off.

Trucks loaded with 4,030 meals left Port-au-Prince on 2 March for emergency distribution in and around Les Cayes. Food has also been sent to Nippes region, north of Les Cayes, which has experienced bad flooding.

The UN World Food Programme, with local authorities and NGOs, plans to supply 10-day rations to affected populations, including some 3,000 people evacuated from their homes.

“The poor state of the sewers caused flooding in every [district] of the city,” said the regional president of the Haitian National Red Cross Society, Jean-Yves Placide.

“In some places the waters rose to ceiling level in people’s houses,” he said. “The situation will be really worrying if it continues to rain. The sun is out now, but the storm clouds come and go.”

“People are used to dealing with floods, just not this early,” one aid worker in Les Cayes told IRIN.

---

Haitian refugee camp moved from swamp

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) yesterday “decongested” an improvised settlement on the outskirts of Leogane where 635 families who lost their homes in the 12 January earthquake had taken refuge.

It’s believed to be the first exercise of its kind in the international humanitarian response to the quake.

The Danish Red Cross relief Emergency Response Unit (ERU) has resettled 126 families in a new tented encampment on privately donated land alongside the old site.

The other 509 families were given a choice of a family-size tent or emergency shelter materials – timber, tarpaulins and toolkits – and are returning to the general areas from which they came.

It was all done on an entirely voluntary basis.

The number of sites identified by the UN as priorities for decongestion in Port-au-Prince has now risen to 21, but an acute shortage of land is making this difficult.

---