Photos: Staff Sergeant Preston Chasteen / DefenseImagery.mil; Logan Abassi / UN Photo
The night after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City in April, 1995, Bob Burton, a volunteer firefighter, went into a dangerous part of the collapsed building known by then as The Pit and heard an isolated cry for help. He found a young woman buried and asked what her name was. “Brandi” she said. She was fifteen. “I was lying sandwiched between rebar and concrete,” Burton recalled, “and, looking up for the first time, I noticed huge chunks of concrete dangling from the rebar. I thought, this is not a safe situation.” With help from others, Burton freed Brandi Liggons from The Pit. She was the last person to come out of the building alive - some 15 hours after the blast.
I arrived in Oklahoma City a day after that scene. Burton was one of hundreds of rescue workers interviewed for a book that I edited (In Their Name, Random House, 1995) on what was, back then, the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Talking to the rescue crews and survivors gave me a quick and concentrated education on the skills needed to find and save people trapped in collapsed buildings.
One of the country’s most skilled experts in this field was a
silver-haired fire chief from New York called Ray Downey. He was known
for an uncanny ability called “reading the wreck.” He could look at a
collapsed structure and instantly see the form of its failure and,
crucially, where voids might exist that enabled victims to survive long
enough to be rescued. With enormous and tragic irony, Chief Downey
himself died in a command center in a building next to the World Trade
Center that collapsed on 9/11.
It was Ray Downey who impressed on me that after a building collapses you have a very limited time to get the people and equipment in place to give yourself a chance of bringing out people alive. (An architect was pulled alive out of a building in Port au Prince after falling three floors into a void, something Downey called “taking the slide.”) This is why, looking at the catastrophe in Haiti, I see the Alfred R. Murrah building multiplied thousands of times and realize how appallingly inadequate the resources are for rescue.
It was my frustration at seeing this that made me so critical of the way the resources of the U.S. were deployed in the first 36 hours in Haiti. Last night, in an interview on the PBS Newshour, President Clinton said that it was clear that nobody was yet in charge of the rescue effort. As the U.N. Special Envoy to Haiti, President Clinton knows the Haitian tragedy with intimate pain. His U.N. staff itself has suffered grievous losses.
What was needed in the first days was an improvised and opportunistic first response to get the heavy lifting machinery, search and rescue crews and medical supplies on the ground. This was the largest triage field the world has ever known since the plague.
What we saw instead was a classic military plan-to assess from the air and from the ground what the impact was, what the logistical challenges would be, and what resources could be marshaled for the task. I have been called to task by a reader for not understanding that “Logistical triage is comparable to medical triage. It has to take place first if you want to be successful.”
I do understand this. But under these circumstance I have a real problem with that classic military habit of mind. As the 19th century chief of staff of the Prussian Army, Helmuth von Moltke, warned: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” In this case what nobody in Washington seems to have grasped is that no plan will survive first contact with a disaster of this scale. Sometimes you can have too much planning and too little action. That is what happened. We have lost the moment when “reading the wreck” could have had its maximum opportunity.
No point in lamenting that any more. Search and rescue teams from Virginia and California (the same places that sent teams to Oklahoma City) did get in, as did others from Europe, Asia and the Americas. Now the chokepoint is, predictably, the airfield at Port au Prince, which lost its air traffic control equipment. It’s now under the control of the U.S. military, using portable ATC facilities. But the problem is not just getting planes in and out, there are limited parking spaces on the tarmac and, with the power out, meager resources for unloading and fueling.
And here is a poignant detail: NPR reported this morning that one aid group has been flying from Florida into Port au Prince for days using a DC-3, a World War II vintage transport-an airplane capable of landing on grass if the earth beneath is firm and dry and of parking there if necessary. Which reminds me of one of the true wonders of American military logistics, the Berlin airlift carried out between June 1948 and May 1949 that saved the city when the Russians blockaded the road and rail connections, trying to starve the population. Haiti, which today truly resembles hell on earth, will need that kind of vision, courage and skill to get through.
Complete Haiti Coverage on Truth.Travel
Haiti Earthquake Coverage on Truth.Travel
Helping Haiti
Where are the Americans?
My Hope for Haiti
Help Population Services International Help Haiti
It was Ray Downey who impressed on me that after a building collapses you have a very limited time to get the people and equipment in place to give yourself a chance of bringing out people alive. (An architect was pulled alive out of a building in Port au Prince after falling three floors into a void, something Downey called “taking the slide.”) This is why, looking at the catastrophe in Haiti, I see the Alfred R. Murrah building multiplied thousands of times and realize how appallingly inadequate the resources are for rescue.
It was my frustration at seeing this that made me so critical of the way the resources of the U.S. were deployed in the first 36 hours in Haiti. Last night, in an interview on the PBS Newshour, President Clinton said that it was clear that nobody was yet in charge of the rescue effort. As the U.N. Special Envoy to Haiti, President Clinton knows the Haitian tragedy with intimate pain. His U.N. staff itself has suffered grievous losses.
What was needed in the first days was an improvised and opportunistic first response to get the heavy lifting machinery, search and rescue crews and medical supplies on the ground. This was the largest triage field the world has ever known since the plague.
What we saw instead was a classic military plan-to assess from the air and from the ground what the impact was, what the logistical challenges would be, and what resources could be marshaled for the task. I have been called to task by a reader for not understanding that “Logistical triage is comparable to medical triage. It has to take place first if you want to be successful.”
I do understand this. But under these circumstance I have a real problem with that classic military habit of mind. As the 19th century chief of staff of the Prussian Army, Helmuth von Moltke, warned: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” In this case what nobody in Washington seems to have grasped is that no plan will survive first contact with a disaster of this scale. Sometimes you can have too much planning and too little action. That is what happened. We have lost the moment when “reading the wreck” could have had its maximum opportunity.
No point in lamenting that any more. Search and rescue teams from Virginia and California (the same places that sent teams to Oklahoma City) did get in, as did others from Europe, Asia and the Americas. Now the chokepoint is, predictably, the airfield at Port au Prince, which lost its air traffic control equipment. It’s now under the control of the U.S. military, using portable ATC facilities. But the problem is not just getting planes in and out, there are limited parking spaces on the tarmac and, with the power out, meager resources for unloading and fueling.
And here is a poignant detail: NPR reported this morning that one aid group has been flying from Florida into Port au Prince for days using a DC-3, a World War II vintage transport-an airplane capable of landing on grass if the earth beneath is firm and dry and of parking there if necessary. Which reminds me of one of the true wonders of American military logistics, the Berlin airlift carried out between June 1948 and May 1949 that saved the city when the Russians blockaded the road and rail connections, trying to starve the population. Haiti, which today truly resembles hell on earth, will need that kind of vision, courage and skill to get through.
Complete Haiti Coverage on Truth.Travel
Haiti Earthquake Coverage on Truth.Travel
Helping Haiti
Where are the Americans?
My Hope for Haiti
Help Population Services International Help Haiti
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