By Natha­nial Gronewald, Greenwire

UNITED NATIONS — Aid work­ers are still scram­bling to pro­vide shel­ter to mil­lions of Haitians made home­less by the earth­quake that lev­eled the cap­i­tal city Port-au-Prince and other towns six months ago today as hur­ri­cane track­ers pre­dict an active storm season.

U.N. offi­cials and dozens of NGOs say they have made progress, mostly in dis­trib­ut­ing food, health care and rudi­men­tary shel­ter. But all acknowl­edge they are unpre­pared for a trop­i­cal storm or hur­ri­cane. Most of the affected 1.5 mil­lion peo­ple are sleep­ing under tents or tarpaulins.

“We’re still very much in the emer­gency response stage,” said Claire Doole of the Inter­na­tional Fed­er­a­tion of Red Cross and Red Cres­cent Soci­eties (IFRC).

Anx­ious about the fate of peo­ple in sprawl­ing tent cities, aid work­ers are build­ing “tran­si­tional shel­ters,” makeshift homes with durable wood or steel frames designed to with­stand storms. Though they can be built quickly and eas­ily, the effort is mov­ing more slowly than ini­tially thought, Doole and oth­ers say.

“In Port-au-Prince, wind is not the prob­lem,” said Timo Luege, com­mu­ni­ca­tions offi­cer for the shel­ter clus­ter set up by mul­ti­ple agen­cies and NGOs. “The prob­lem is rain, the prob­lem is water.”

In Port-au-Prince, tran­si­tional shel­ters can be set up more quickly, designed to with­stand wind from a cat­e­gory 1 hur­ri­cane, the least-powerful trop­i­cal cyclone, Luege said. But rain from even the small­est hur­ri­cane would send tor­rents of stormwa­ter off the city’s defor­ested hills to wash away tent communities.

By con­trast, shel­ters going up in Jacmel and Leogane, two other dev­as­tated com­mu­ni­ties, are more durable — able to with­stand a cat­e­gory 4 hur­ri­cane. But while offi­cials report faster progress set­ting up tran­si­tional shel­ters in those cities, efforts to move the home­less to bet­ter hous­ing in the cap­i­tal is prov­ing to be a greater chal­lenge, they say.

“The prob­lem in Port-au-Prince is the lack of space, it’s find­ing the land which the local author­i­ties are able to give us,” said Doole, “so the process has taken much longer than all of us would wish.”

All told, the aid community’s shel­ter clus­ter says it plans to set up 135,000 tran­si­tional shel­ters over the com­ing months. Thus far 5,657 have been com­pleted. More than 14,900 are now in Haiti await­ing con­struc­tion, and 31,335 more are on their way, with mate­ri­als being imported pri­mar­ily from the United States, Canada, Domini­can Repub­lic and var­i­ous ports in Latin America.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmos­pheric Admin­is­tra­tion (NOAA) pre­dicts that ocean tem­per­a­tures and cur­rents will pro­vide ideal con­di­tions for North Atlantic and Caribbean hur­ri­cane for­ma­tion this sum­mer. The agency is pre­dict­ing 14 to 23 “named storms” will form this year, with 8 to 14 likely to strengthen into hurricanes.

The wood– and steel-frame shel­ters are much more capa­ble of stand­ing up to wind and rain. But nev­er­the­less the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment and U.N. del­e­gates on the ground are try­ing to come up with an emer­gency evac­u­a­tion plan, though the storm sea­son is well under way.

Work is ongo­ing to iden­tify build­ings that sur­vived the earth­quake and are large and strong enough to pro­tect mul­ti­ple num­bers of vul­ner­a­ble Haitians. The plan entails train­ing vol­un­teers liv­ing in the tent cities on how to coor­di­nate evac­u­a­tion to storm shel­ters in the event of an emer­gency. Home­less Haitians would be given time to dis­as­sem­ble their tents or makeshift shel­ters and wait out the storm with their belongings.

But Luege and oth­ers admit that so far they have not been able to find enough emer­gency shel­ters to house all of Port-au-Prince’s home­less pop­u­la­tion, let alone peo­ple in other affected areas.

“You should not be in most per­ma­nent houses you find in Haiti in case of a hur­ri­cane,” Luege said. “You need to be in an evac­u­a­tion cen­ter, and there’s not enough of those. The prepa­ra­tion for a hur­ri­cane is not at the point where it should be.”

But prepa­ra­tions are ongo­ing nonethe­less. Thou­sands are being put to work build­ing drainage chan­nels and flood walls around the cap­i­tal, to slow flood­wa­ters down. The World Food Pro­gramme says it is pre-positioning emer­gency food rations in 31 spots around the coun­try, most in the quake zone.

Aid work­ers are also sound­ing the alarm on fresh water and san­i­ta­tion. Though access to health care for many Haitians is arguably bet­ter than before the quake, not enough peo­ple have access to improved san­i­ta­tion facil­i­ties, leav­ing the prospect for an out­break of dis­ease ever-present.

“The cur­rent sit­u­a­tion is not sus­tain­able,” IFRC warns in a new report. “The IFRC and other agen­cies pro­vid­ing water and san­i­ta­tion ser­vices on behalf of the Hait­ian author­i­ties are cur­rently stretched beyond their capac­ity and mandate.”

Agri­cul­tural success

Some progress is being made to help Haiti grow its own food, as well, though an esti­mated 4 mil­lion peo­ple are still almost com­pletely depen­dent on food aid or food-for-work systems.

About 142,000 rural house­holds have been given agri­cul­ture help, mostly seeds and fer­til­iz­ers. The U.N. Food and Agri­cul­ture Orga­ni­za­tion (FAO) esti­mates more than 1,800 met­ric tons of rice, bean and corn seeds have been dis­trib­uted. Farm­ers have also been handed 100,000 banana plants and 6 mil­lion roots and tubers for plant­ing pota­toes and other starch crops.

The tens of thou­sands dis­placed to the coun­try­side have also pro­vided some­thing of a boost to Haiti’s degraded envi­ron­ment, with the unem­ployed put to work plant­ing scores of trees as addi­tional storm bar­ri­ers. But rural NGO’s say the stress of the influx of new peo­ple in need is also begin­ning to take its toll.

“It’s been a boon and a chal­lenge,” said Scott Sabin, direc­tor of Plant With Pur­pose, a California-based non­profit with 13 years of expe­ri­ence work­ing in rural Haiti.

Sabin’s orga­ni­za­tion has so far hired some 2,200 work­ers to plant more than 170,000 trees to pro­tect com­mu­ni­ties. The extra avail­able labor has allowed him to scale up Plant With Purpose’s oper­a­tions, con­struct­ing more than 260 miles of soil ero­sion bar­ri­ers to pro­tect farm­land from hur­ri­canes and trop­i­cal storms.

Still, “it also means that same envi­ron­ment has to feed a lot more mouths and there’s a lot more pres­sure on it in terms of peo­ple and so forth.” Sabin said. He warns that large camps of dis­placed peo­ple are often hotbeds of envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion to the sur­round­ing area, pri­mar­ily through exac­er­bated defor­esta­tion as the des­per­ate seek out new build­ing mate­ri­als or char­coal for cooking.

And despite the United Nations’ desire to see the rurally dis­placed stay in the coun­try­side to help build the econ­omy there, Sabin warns that many are return­ing to the cities after fail­ing to find any steady work.

“Sev­eral hun­dred thou­sand have come back to Port-au-Prince, and there’s quite a fair num­ber that are in-between,” he said. “They’ll go out and stay with rel­a­tives for a few days, have noth­ing to do there, so they go back to Port-au-Prince look­ing for aid, and go back and forth.”

Grim account­ing

The Hait­ian gov­ern­ment puts the death toll of the Jan. 12 earth­quake at 222,570, though experts say the exact fig­ure will never be known. More than 300,000 were injured, and 1.5 mil­lion forced into some 1,300 makeshift tent and tarp set­tle­ments scat­tered through­out the affected areas. Up to 600,000 are liv­ing with host fam­i­lies. Total value of the dam­age is put at $7.8 bil­lion, or 120 per­cent of that nation’s 2009 gross domes­tic product.

Around 300,000 homes were destroyed or dam­aged beyond repair. Con­struc­tion of new per­ma­nent hous­ing is not expected to com­mence until early sum­mer of 2011 as efforts focus on tran­si­tional hous­ing. Some 200 mil­lion met­ric tons of rub­ble still sit atop lots and even some road­ways, and offi­cials say they can­not move in to clear debris until they get a green light from prop­erty owners.

Though bil­lions of dol­lars are being tossed at the recov­ery effort, offi­cials insist they see no signs of cor­rup­tion or graft at the moment, but admit wor­ry­ing that instances will arise once the aid com­mu­nity gives way to the pri­vate sec­tor as homes and gov­ern­ment build­ings are restored.

Nev­er­the­less reports of land dis­putes are increas­ing as wealthy land own­ers demand high rents from the gov­ern­ment to house their fel­low cit­i­zens in tem­po­rary com­mu­ni­ties. Spotty or nonex­is­tent land tenure records are also pit­ting neigh­bor against neigh­bor in dis­putes over who owns cer­tain plots.

Vio­lence over land seems to be on the rise. The Asso­ci­ated Press reports that pow­er­ful land own­ers are now orga­niz­ing gangs to beat squat­ters off prop­erty they are claim­ing. Mean­while the squat­ters are form­ing their own asso­ci­a­tions claim­ing rights to build on prop­erty they say is pub­lic, con­fi­dent that the gov­ern­ment and U.N. troops will back their claims.

Aid work­ers say no one should expect a quick recov­ery. Luege notes that in Banda Aceh, Indone­sia — the city most dev­as­tated in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami — it took about one year to set­tle all the dis­placed into tran­si­tional shel­ters, but another five years to get houses rebuilt as the gov­ern­ment and aid work­ers sorted through var­i­ous land claims.

“It’s pretty obvi­ous that this is going to take a long, long time,” Sabin said.

http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/07/12/12greenwire-devastated-haiti-braces-for-an-active-hurrican-11849.html