Posted:
February 2, 2010
Writing in the London-based Lloyd’s List Feb. 1, Michael Grey provided a sophisticated viewpoint on the ongoing relief operation to deliver substantial and sustainable aid to the people of earthquake-stricken Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas of Haiti – a more comprehensive analysis than is apparently being provided by the international media on the ground in the island nation.
Remarking on international media coverage of relief operations in Haiti, Grey wrote: “No credit at all was being given to the teams that were successfully managing to provide some order among the chaos, some sort of distributive system where there were no passable roads and no working port.”
Amidst televised reports on “the lack of progress,” there “obviously was some reward for a lot of hard work beginning to show through,” Grey wrote.
“Within a couple of days of the catastrophe, there was the nuclear carrier, Carl Vincent, lying offshore serving as a floating airfield for helicopters and goodness knows what else. A couple of days later, watching some yapping hack castigating everyone for the slow progress, I glimpsed the U.S. hospital ship, Comfort, with its dozen or so operating theatres, anchored a couple of miles out. Within a week, some 10 Military Sealift Command vessels had been tasked to Haitian relief,” he wrote.
“Best of all was the availability of the maritime pre-positioning ship, 1st Lt. Jack Lummus, which was fortuitously in Jacksonville being emptied of its military stores in preparation for a refit, and which was quickly stuffed full of heavy earthmoving machinery, electrical machinery, water purification gear, port handling equipment and every kind of fuel, along with landing barges to get the supplies ashore.” (Photos of the USNS Lummus discharging heavy equipment, relief supplies and cargo in Port-au-Prince)
Grey pointed out a BBC reporter was covering damage to the port while “there were forklift trucks already being discharged from the Lummus, which had arrived that morning, by one of the landing barges, not that she seemed to notice.” He also noted the availability of a large catamaran ferry under the control of the Maritime Administration “just a few hours’ steaming at 40 knots away.”
In his column, Grey called for “an unbiased report of the U.S. response to this natural disaster” and an “attempt to derive some lessons from it.”
He continued: “Sure the U.S. is the one superpower that could make available these assets with such expedition, but would it not be a sensible precaution to recognize the tremendous power of ships to provide really meaningful quantities of aid in such circumstances, and to develop an international responding capability?”
Grey concluded: “Disasters happen far away from U.S. shores. We know enough about the sort of equipment that is needed, while there are existing ships that could be allocated and made available in a sort of global insurance system. It is called a realistic contingency, and while there might be plenty of this done by relief agencies, it’s the delivery systems we need.”
"Credit where it’s due" – delivering relief to Haiti
Writing in the London-based Lloyd’s List Feb. 1, Michael Grey provided a sophisticated viewpoint on the ongoing relief operation to deliver substantial and sustainable aid to the people of earthquake-stricken Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas of Haiti – a more comprehensive analysis than is apparently being provided by the international media on the ground in the island nation.
Remarking on international media coverage of relief operations in Haiti, Grey wrote: “No credit at all was being given to the teams that were successfully managing to provide some order among the chaos, some sort of distributive system where there were no passable roads and no working port.”
Amidst televised reports on “the lack of progress,” there “obviously was some reward for a lot of hard work beginning to show through,” Grey wrote.
“Within a couple of days of the catastrophe, there was the nuclear carrier, Carl Vincent, lying offshore serving as a floating airfield for helicopters and goodness knows what else. A couple of days later, watching some yapping hack castigating everyone for the slow progress, I glimpsed the U.S. hospital ship, Comfort, with its dozen or so operating theatres, anchored a couple of miles out. Within a week, some 10 Military Sealift Command vessels had been tasked to Haitian relief,” he wrote.
“Best of all was the availability of the maritime pre-positioning ship, 1st Lt. Jack Lummus, which was fortuitously in Jacksonville being emptied of its military stores in preparation for a refit, and which was quickly stuffed full of heavy earthmoving machinery, electrical machinery, water purification gear, port handling equipment and every kind of fuel, along with landing barges to get the supplies ashore.” (Photos of the USNS Lummus discharging heavy equipment, relief supplies and cargo in Port-au-Prince)
Grey pointed out a BBC reporter was covering damage to the port while “there were forklift trucks already being discharged from the Lummus, which had arrived that morning, by one of the landing barges, not that she seemed to notice.” He also noted the availability of a large catamaran ferry under the control of the Maritime Administration “just a few hours’ steaming at 40 knots away.”
In his column, Grey called for “an unbiased report of the U.S. response to this natural disaster” and an “attempt to derive some lessons from it.”
He continued: “Sure the U.S. is the one superpower that could make available these assets with such expedition, but would it not be a sensible precaution to recognize the tremendous power of ships to provide really meaningful quantities of aid in such circumstances, and to develop an international responding capability?”
Grey concluded: “Disasters happen far away from U.S. shores. We know enough about the sort of equipment that is needed, while there are existing ships that could be allocated and made available in a sort of global insurance system. It is called a realistic contingency, and while there might be plenty of this done by relief agencies, it’s the delivery systems we need.”