PHOTOS, PAGE 1

       Editor and prime reporter is Doug Terry, a veteran television and radio reporter in   Washington, DC, (details below)

Honore: 1)Improve communications. 2) Get food and water in.  3) Take care of the health and needs of people. 4) Evacuate people, particularly those who are pregnant, disabled, injured, babies, those who cannot take care of themselves. 5) Establish who's in charge. The president of Haiti [Rene Preval] is in charge.

It's different when the president and his government are victims. They are going to need help. Someone needs to be the face of the operation to help the president keep people alive.

TerryReport comment: Food and water would be the normal procedure and the US Military, once they took over the airport, established that   priority. In this case, however, there were so many badly injured people that doctors and medical supplies should have been a higher priority. People can go for many days, even weeks, without food if they have to, especially in a poor country where people are “trained” by circumstance to do without. The unfortunate fact is that people died on the streets of Port au Prince because we were unable to get medical attention, and supplies, to them fast enough.

Additionally, evacuations are needed in Haiti because it could be impossible to sustain so many people without basic services over an extended period.

The idea of improving communications as a first priority might seem strange to many people. especially those inexperienced in disaster relief. Most of us are so accustomed to instant cell phone communication and easy email that it is difficult to imagine what it is like living without them. The very first responders in a disaster are literally going in blind to the larger picture. All they can know is what they see in front of them. As a result, there is no way to calibrate efforts and quantify what will be necessary in the coming days. New Orleans in 2005, as an example, was a series of disaster zones that added up to massive needs, but the news media and emergency responders were collectively unable to paint the broader picture and call on the resources necessary to make an effective response.

Calibrating response is the job of leadership, but that leadership can be limited to missteps if the information coming in is inaccurate or incomplete. We have seen the same sort of misjudgment about the needed response to Haiti that we saw in New Orleans, but people seem to be more forgiving in this case because of the logistics problems and the distance from other population centers. What is unclear at this point (1.31.10) is whether another slow moving disaster has been set on course by the uncoordinated response of the world to Haiti.

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