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The US is sending another 4,000 Navy sailors and Marines to Haiti for the earthquake relief effort, diverting them from deployments in the Gulf and Africa. The Pentagon reported on Wednesday that the Navy hospital ship Comfort, had received its first Haitian patients. WAMU reporter Sabri Ben-Achour is onboard the USNS Comfort and sent this report.
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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World. Authorities say the hunt for any remaining survivors of Haiti’s earthquake is starting to wind down. Haitian officials says at least 75,000 people have been buried in mass graves, but the death toll from last week’s quake is much higher. Despite the grim numbers, there are a few signs that things are slowly starting to improve. Kenneth Merten is US ambassador.
KENNETH MERTEN: Some normal aspects of life are starting to come back. Open air markets are open, people appear to be trying to go out and about and doing their business to the extent they can.
WERMAN: Today, Haiti’s commerce minister said banks will start operating in the next few days to get cash flowing. Still, many thousands are still waiting for basic help; food, shelter, and medical care. Some are getting that care on the U.S. Naval Ship Comfort. It’s a former oil tanker that’s been converted into a floating hospital. The ship is now anchored a mile off shore of the capital Port au Prince. Reporter Sabri Ben-Achour is on board and sent this report.
SABRI BEN-ACHOUR: A helicopter touches down on the flight deck of the U.S. Naval ship Comfort. It’s carrying patients, victims of the earthquake. They come on stretchers, down through elevators into Casualty Receiving or Cas Rec, where a team of medics is waiting for each one. Commander Tim Donahue is head of surgery aboard the ship
TIM DONAHUE: Yeah, so his is a young gentleman who came from a shore facility who’s has burns on 30 percent of his body, covering his face, his arms and his chest.
BEN-ACHOUR: Some of the patients have been transported from other ships, aircraft carriers or frigates that don’t have the facilities to treat the most critically injured. But more and more of the cases are arriving from the shore, 25 in an hour. Lieutenant Commander Danny Dauroro is in charge of nursing. He has done humanitarian work for years in Haiti.
DANNY DAURORO: This does not compare by any stretch of the imagination. Just some of the crush injuries, some of them what we would call traumatic amputations, facial injuries. It’s the orthopedic injuries and ensuing infections that have followed, that are unique to what we’re dealing with right now.
BEN-ACHOUR: The patients are coming from 35 medical nodes on the ground, sites where the military and NGOs and the Ministry of Health have set up clinics or triage centers. Captain Andrew Johnson is in charge of medical operations on the ship.
CAPTAIN JOHNSON: So we’re expecting patients from all over and that’s what my men and I working right now, how to coordinate from all the sites to get the information in and have it in a focused manner.
SABRI BEN-ACHOUR: On the back of the ship, Amy Puffenberger is spraying uniforms with insecticide to kill off mosquitoes carrying malaria.
AMY PUFFENBERGER: This is what will prevent getting bitten.
BEN-ACHOUR: The bug spray is an extra precaution for rapid assessment teams that will go ashore by helicopter and bring back more patients. Some are children, like this 12-year- old girl recovering from a hole punched out of her skull. Neurologist Mill Etienne is treating her.
MILL ETIENNE: Well, basically she was playing outside of her house, and she said all of a sudden, she said the earth started trembling. Because there is really not a clear word for earthquake in Haiti because it’s not something that we have there. But that’s how she described it which I thought was a very vivid explanation. And she said that a little bit of the house fell on her. Her family was trying to run out of the house. Unfortunately, her mom and her 16-year-old sister did not make it.
BEN-ACHOUR: Her father survived, and he’s living on the remains of their home. Other children arriving onboard have no parents at all. And that raises a difficult question, what to do with children, or anyone, once they’ve been treated on this ship. Many have nowhere else to go.
ANDREW JOHNSON: We would actually want to try to get them back to Haiti. I mean, it’s their home nation.
BEN-ACHOUR: Again, Commander Andrew Johnson.
JOHNSON: We’re there trying to rebuild their infrastructure and assist them. We’re here to help Haiti and the Ministry. And so we’ll work with the Ministry. We’re not going to drop people off in the middle of a field somewhere.
BEN-ACHOUR: Johnson says he’s counting on NGO’s and USAID and Haiti’s Ministry of Health to step in.
JOHNSON: We’ll obviously have a plan to plug them back in and have some direction.
BEN-ACHOUR: But the Comfort just got here, and so far, patients are coming, not going. This ship has space for a thousand of them. For the World I’m Sabri Ben-Achour aboard the U.S.N. Comfort off the coast of Haiti.
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