Frustrations mount as aid piles up in Haiti

February 3, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — A generous world has flooded Haiti with donations, but anger and desperation are mounting as the aid stacks up inside this broken country.

Bottlenecks at key transportation points and scattered violence, including an armed group’s attack on a food convoy, have slowed the distribution of food and medicine from the port, airport and a warehouse in the Cite-Soleil slum. U.S. air-traffic controllers have lined up 2,550 incoming flights through March 1, but some 25 flights a day aren’t taking their slots. Communication breakdowns between Haitians and their foreign counterparts are also endemic.

“Aid is bottlenecking at the Port-au-Prince airport. It’s not getting into the field,” said Mike O’Keefe, who runs Bayan Air Service in Fort Lauderdale.

Foreign-aid workers and Haitians are fed up with waiting for help. One Haitian father paid a group of men more than $200 on Tuesday to retrieve his daughter’s body from his collapsed house, rather than wait for demolition crews.

“No one is in charge,” said Dr. Rob Maddox of Start, Louisiana, tending to dozens of patients in the capital’s sprawling general hospital. “There’s no top-down leadership. The Swiss don’t want to cooperate with us. And since the Haitian government took control of our supplies, we have to wait for things even though they’re stacked up in the warehouse. The situation is just madness.”

Donors say the key logistical challenges are dealing with a backlog of supply flights at the airport, repairing and increasing the capacity of the city’s piers and dealing with clogged overland routes from outlying airports and Dominican Republic. Most roads are just two lanes with many potholes.

Some are also worried that isolated routes are vulnerable to ambush. Haiti is plagued with crime, violence and gangs.

Twenty armed men blocked a road and tried to hijack a convoy of food for earthquake victims Saturday but were driven off by police gunfire, U.N. spokesman Vicenzo Pugliese said Tuesday.

The attack on the convoy underscored what the United Nations calls a “potentially volatile” security situation.