There are couple of things that make Port-Au-Prince (PAP) unique.
Haiti gets regularly hit by hurricanes. They have an abysmal electrical system.
During normal times you are lucky to get 10 hours of electricity a day.
There are 4 cell phone carriers, 30 percent of the population owns cell phones.
If you are cell phone carrier, you always want to have 24 hours of operations.
In order to do that in PAP you had to have a very robust generator - fuel supply system and distribution just to handle the "Haiti" normal daily power outages. So post catastrophe - guess what the cell phones came up pretty quick and many got to call the US to relatives to tell them "They are starving and had no water for days". I'm pretty sure no post-apocalyptic fiction writer saw that one possibly happening.
Additionally with only one undersea cable a lot of telecom-traffic is handled by satellite and is also why TV/ISPs were able to deliver video and messages immediately after the quake.
The water system in PAP was also lousy in normal times so water-trucks, walking 5 miles to a kiosk a large portion of the population was used to that. So when the quake hit and the city lost its mains. The water trucks still worked.
So ironically their horrible utilities and the system in place to cope with that saved many in a quake generated catastrophe.
Ham radio does not pretend to replace the phone company / 911 and never did. So you're a little misinformed there. And among the ham radio guys... all 650,000 in the US less than one half percent are trained and have an interest in
emergency communications Even then I am being generous.. probably closer to a quarter of percent.
Yes the ham radios and antennas can cost from 600-2500 dollars depending on your goals, but the equipment lasts 20 years. So exactly how much money have you spent on computer equipment in 20 years and how much is that biyearly cell phone contract? Ham radio plays a very very small but necessary role in helping route emergency information from point A to point B when all else fails it is the last line of communication.
Even in Katrina, the two groups I am credited with helping assist used cell phones to call out to a distant relative, I just completed their call for help to the closest authority. Even in the twitter example it took several hops to find someone who could help.
Ham radios role in Haiti this time can be counted on one hand. I knew one of the two Haitian Ham radio operators that got on air a couple days after the quake. Almost all in the Haitian Radio club had lost a relative to the quake.
How many Ham radio operators do think a very impoverished country as Haiti has? Exactly what is that Haitian radio operator going to say on day two after the quake that we didnt already know. We were sending the kitchen sink, the bathroom sink our neighbors sink in an effort to help take away some of the misery.
As a life long computer geek and later radio geek I applaud ANY means of communications method that saves lives and minimizes human misery.
Every disaster is different... if a category three hurricane hit PAP there would be no cell phone, nor satellite dishes...
But that undersea cable would still be there and radio always works.
AG4ZG
