links for 2010-01-15

DHL’s director of humanitarian affairs, who has worked in disaster relief in tsunami- and hurricane-hit countries for five years, said, “I’ve got the feeling that this one is going to turn out worse than all of them because the airport itself is part of the victim in all of this.”

Rescue teams trying to leave the airport to start work in Port-au-Prince waited more than two hours for transportation to the American Embassy, just three miles from the terminal. ... Large shipments of supplies cannot yet reach the capital by sea either because of heavy damage to the nation’s largest seaport at Port-au-Prince. Richard Lebrun, a spokesman for Terminal Varreux, the company that operates the main port facilities, said that its two terminals in Port-au-Prince were both destroyed by the quake.

Thirty dockworkers who were unloading freight drowned when the quake struck Tuesday, the company said. ... “I think it’s going to be worse than anyone still understands”

It got some news and photos out, but it is unclear whether it did anything at all to get info in to Haiti. "Indeed, an effective and coordinated global relief effort depends on detailed information and communications, and the mainstream media is still an important part of that process."

Last night, Sky News was the first international news platform to have pictures from on the ground and a live interview from Haiti – we were the first to know what was going on. Here’s why.

Unsurprisingly, the earthquake took out all the landline and mobile phone lines in Haiti immediately. This obviously disabled the country spectacularly – as well as the pressing issue of not being able to speak to each other, it meant that Haitians were not able to speak to the rest of the world. ... However, those with generators still had access to the internet...and a few still had the web on their phones. At the beginning of the night, there was nothing coming in from the news agencies, who were having no better luck than us at finding out what was going on. So we turned to the crowd – what were people saying on the ground, right now?

Twitter proved invaluable.

Text HAITI from your cellphone, this is the way "MGive typically charges a licensing fee for its software platform, $4 to $1,500 a month, depending on the scale of the fund-raising effort and the additional services the company provides. In addition, after the charity receives the total amount raised from the wireless carriers, mGive charges a transaction fee for each collected donation.
In the case of the Haiti disaster, however, Mr. Aiello said the company had elected to waive all software and transaction fees.