General says 1,400 planes waiting to bring aid to Haiti as officials open another airport

1,400 planes waiting to bring aid to Haiti

WASHINGTON — With more than 1,400 planes still waiting to bring aid to Haiti, the commander of U.S. forces in the region said Thursday that officials have opened a third alternate airport to hasten the movement of relief supplies for earthquake victims.

About 120 to 140 flights a day are now able to land at the country’s single airport in Port-au-Prince, which was damaged in last week’s earthquake, Gen. Douglas Fraser, head of the U.S. Southern Command, told a Pentagon news conference. Still, he said, officials have a waiting list of more than 1,400 planes seeking to get into the country as well as a backup of vessels waiting to unload at the damaged port.

Some aid flights also started landing earlier this week at Jacmel, Haiti, and the San Isidro airport in neighboring Santo Domingo; and now a third alternate airport has been opened at Barahona, a closer location over the border in the Dominican Republic, he said by videoconference from Haiti.

With arrival of a Navy landing craft on Wednesday, officials expect Thursday to be able to start moving 150 shipping containers each day through the severely damaged port facility — and eventually accept 800 containers a day.

Fraser said he asked for the 2,000 extra Marines now on their way to Haiti because the military has been getting more requests for troops who can escort the humanitarian assistance to various areas. Officials are still trying to determine exactly where the group from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit’s USS Nassau will be used, he said.

Despite isolated incidents of looting, violence and other criminal activity, the overall security situation remains calm, Fraser said.

Separately, Gen. David Petraeus, who served with U.S. forces in Haiti during Operation Uphold Democracy in 1995, told an audience at Georgetown University Law School that the U.S. should be cautious about getting so deeply involved in the rebuilding of Haiti that the U.S. would find it hard to disengage.

“We’re in a very tricky situation right now where on the one hand you obviously want to save lives” and move quickly to distribute medical assistance and other aid to survivors, he said. “But, frankly, you have to be careful not to take something over that then becomes more difficult to give back because you took it over.”

So it will be important, for example, to allow the U.N. peacekeeping force that was in place before the quake to play a central role, Petraeus said, and to focus on develop Haiti’s capability to stand on its own. Petraeus is commander of U.S. Central Command, which has no direct role in Haiti or the Caribbean.

There were more than 13,000 American sailors, soldiers, airmen and Marines working on the Haiti effort Thursday, 2,676 on the ground and 10,445 on ships offshore, Fraser said.

The number was expected to grow to 4,600 on the ground by the weekend, he said. Officials had previously said there would be 6,000 on the ground by weekend. The numbers have fluctuated daily as Marines move to and from their ships and as some arrivals have been delayed by the clogged Port-au-Prince airport runway.