The totality of international efforts must be doubled or tripled since many Haitians without water, food, medical two weeks after the earthquake. Apocolypse Now? The “Horror”!

I believe you Mr. President must create jobs and more jobs. You have failed thus far.

No to the world, the US military is not using this very sorrowful event in Haiti to place US troops there as the Europeans and others are whipering and again, while we are close to the disaster, we are there to assist the people of Haiti, a people so pervaded w/poverty and lack of much….

Maybe Mr. President you can muster a civilian Haitian corps of folks the US can muster – carpenters and other trades people struggling for work here and put them to work. There are so many types of skills necessitated in the rebuild of Haiti.

It also points to the fact that we need to build our civil defense, create jobs for people who can get trained and employed to respond to neighbor when like substantial events pose risk to the US populace. It shows the necessity for more first response training and implementation – preparedness and coordination to be timely and effective.

From my perspective whether making repeated attempts at various government, military and commercial levels to get much needed financial support and supplies/products into Haiti or to muster global community support of profitable wastewater and quality water solutions throughout Africa as well as to the clean up of the Ganges River in India, we need organization, coordinated and well versed US and others prepared.

The logitics folks to the relief workers deserve accolades, if we together are having difficulty handling Haiti and getting medical and required solutions and bureacracy has become fsr too much and inhibits us, then let’s get some true leadership as there is much demand to be addressed – fellow humans, children tat need food now, access to quality water, medical attention, housing, etc.

Christopher Tingus

What I can say for sure is that I am not prepared to draw an analogy between this event and either Hurricane Katrina or the Asian tsunami. To me, context matters a lot, and each of these events presents very different circumstances.

I have done a lot of thinking about recovery, its relationship to strategy, and, more importantly, its relationship to pre-existing conditions, particularly the economic/political and material reality that emerges as a product of social/cultural and environmental circumstances (and for that matter vice versa). My offline musing on these issues have proven extremely difficult to condense into a coherent argument suitable for publication on this blog (or elsewhere). I am prepared, however, to give it a go if there’s adequate interest in engaging the debate.

In the meantime, I invite you — Claire and others — to elaborate further on the issues you would like to see explored in this forum.

Claire — What issues would you ask people to look at if they wanted to learn from Haiti lessons that could be applied in the US in the event of an (contextually) equivalent catastrophic event?

Will be interesting to see if any priorities are established by the President’s SOU tonight. Interesting how difficult it is for either Congress or the Executive Branch to establish priorities. The Secretary DHS released her priorities yesterday. No indication really of the priority of the priorities. Well in founding and implementing DHS several key missions were assigned. 1. WMD prevention, protection, and response. 2. Domestic Intel. 3. Critical infrastructure protection and cyber security. All are technical arenas including their technological and scientific aspects. Butit appears that DHS after almost eight years is settling into not what needs doing but what it can do? Perhaps after one year the President will adopt the same bureacratic crouch. Hoping for more leadership in the American polity. We have lists but never one listing the top 100 American citizens that are our countries leaders! I list Steve Jobs in the top 100 for his technology inventiveness and pure obstinacy and striving. Would be interesting to see a list of the top 100 most influential on Homeland Security matters. Surely the leadership of DHS should qualify and probably does but I would argue that others may be more of an eye of the beholder. I also include the President since he can make or break Homeland Security through decision or indecision, funding or non-funding, quality of appointees or lack of quality. In other words some might just be on the list for negative reasons, e.g. UBL? The money spent studying his various transmissions would be interesting to see tabulate.

Presently, both DHS and HUD are currently working on a National Recovery Framework. There is no know yet if their planning is broad and deep enough to anticipate a truly catastrophic event. These are among the reasons I think the Haiti event should be a wakeup call to all concerned.

I think the GAO report issued in July 2009 (“DISASTER RECOVERY Experiences from Past Disasters Offer Insights for Effective Collaboration after Catastrophic Events”) sets out 4 core lessons that are worth looking at in regard to Haiti and the next catastrophic disaster in the US:

Develop and communicate common goals to guide recovery.
Leverage resources to facilitate recovery.
Use recovery plans to agree on roles and responsibilities.
Monitor, evaluate, and report on progress made toward recovery.

That’s a start, especially if we could get better at transforming lessons to be learned into actions that are actually done.