Haiti is several weeks post-earthquake. Royal Caribbean’s involvement is what one would expect from our company and people. The media has moved on to other topics or at least other aspects of the post-earthquake environment. Meanwhile, our people and guests continue to help. This will remain true for a very long time given Haiti’s needs.
I would like to thank the remarkable number of people who wrote letters, sent emails and posted on blogs in support of the calls of our ships and the importance of delivering supplies, maintaining economic activity and sustaining hope. Some of the most heartfelt communications came from our own employees including at headquarters.
Fortunately the number of employees who have not made contact with us has significantly reduced. For days it was stuck at 34 out of 50 and it seemed that we were facing a possible 68% death rate of our crew who were at home in Haiti on vacation. Now the number is down to 11 and none of those are confirmed dead. So we continue to hope that all of our crew are in fact safe but we simply do not know. Nine of the 11 have addresses in the Dominican Republic so we’re hoping some of the 11 were not even in Haiti at the time. Obviously we are trying to contact them to be sure.
The ships are routinely bringing in pallets of supplies and within a week we will have delivered over 1,000 pallets. There is a focus right now on getting three generators onboard to be delivered to schools in Haiti. Also by a week from now we will have contributed over $500,000 in proceeds from the revenue we normally earn during our Labadee calls. In addition, in aggregate our shoreside employees, guests and crew have donated $300,000 to relief efforts.
Maryse and Daniel Kedar continue to implement their water distribution efforts in PAP. John Weis has been back and forth between PAP and Florida as he settles into his new role working for the UN. While the world needs to be generous, there’s no substitute for knowledge of logistics, distribution, facilities and port infrastructure. John has all of this skill and experience and he will be invaluable to Dr. Paul Farmer’s efforts.
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There are a lot of reasons why it is a good thing John Weis is in Haiti. Most of them have to do with helping the recovery effort and partnering with Messrs. Clinton and Farmer. But another reason is helping me with this blog as the earnings call last week and the Board meeting next week have put me squarely behind the eight ball. Anyway, there really isn’t anything I can say that matches John’s eyewitness account from Port-au-Prince.
This is day two in Haiti and from what I am told things are getting better slowly but surely. When I arrived I was expecting to see the worst but the first thing I saw was two C-17’s landing from the US unloading pallet after pallet of supplies. There were other nations at the airport as well including Brazil, U.K., Israel, France and Canada all with troops on the ground and ready to assist in any way they could. What was amazing is that as fast as they unloaded, it was being taken out of the airport compound to those who needed it. There were huge encampments of relief workers only dwarfed by the camps set up by the people of Haiti that had lost their homes.
The other thing that struck me was the sheer number of people on the ground helping in the relief effort. Not just military, but ordinary citizens who dropped what they were doing and came down here to help, some on their own dime and some associated with organizations or governments. Three of the people I spoke with had jobs and families that they simply put on hold and came down to Haiti to help people they didn’t even know.
While I thought I was prepared to see the destruction as a result of the pictures you see on the news, being here and seeing it is another story. The destruction in the downtown area was complete and very focused in the area of the government buildings and the immediate surrounding areas, although there is no place you can go where there isn’t some level of destruction by the earthquake.
Destruction to a building in Haiti
The pictures fail to capture the magnitude of the destruction and the raw power it took to destroy some of these buildings that had walls 3 feet thick. Many people are living on the streets right in front of their homes because they are afraid to go back inside. Other homes, while still standing have huge structural cracks making them unsafe. Others have had their homes completely destroyed and you see them trying to salvage what they can from their homes taking what they can from their lives before the quake.
Each day a new set of opportunities, setbacks, advances and delays unfolds in and outside Haiti. The UN is obviously a major player in the relief and recovery effort. As previously noted we have worked closely with them especially in connection with President Clinton, Special UN Envoy to Haiti, and his Deputy Special Envoy Dr. Paul Farmer.
They have an absolutely enormous job on their hands and while all of our efforts are helpful to them, we have decided to provide more direct and immediate assistance in a form I believe will be exceptionally productive. We have agreed to second John Weis, our Associate VP, Private Destinations, to Paul Farmer for three months. John did a phenomenal job getting Labadee ready for Oasis of the Seas prior to the earthquake, and since the earthquake he has done a exceptional job of mobilizing our relief effort. While we will certainly feel John’s absence, we are proud to contribute him in this fashion. I have asked him to comment on this new twist in his relationship with Haiti:
I want to convey my thanks to Royal Caribbean, Adam and Craig Milan for giving me the opportunity to take on this challenge. My wife Stacy also supports this so I want to thank her as well. Over the past 3 three years, I have had the opportunity to do a lot of work in Haiti, so I have made many friends there and have grown to appreciate the friendliness of the people, their ingenuity and their endurance. So in short, I have a huge amount of gratitude for the team supporting this relief effort and the opportunity to work on something I have a great passion for.
My first and immediate task is to look at the logistics framework from a long-term perspective and establish a storage and distribution depot here in South Florida. I will share more details on this in the weeks to come.
The relief and rebuilding effort will be monumental and it is going to be completed one step at a time. Looking at everything that needs to be done to rebuild an entire city that has been destroyed can be daunting. People on the ground, like Maryse Kedar, and people back here, like Richard Pruitt, who is coordinating the relief effort on the Royal Caribbean side, will make sure this becomes a reality. I wanted to share with you some of Maryse and her team of eight’s efforts - which includes two crew members that went to her for help and are now playing a big role in the water distribution.
Royal Caribbean International continues to provide supplies and other assistance towards the Haitian relief effort. By the end of this week, 120 palettes of supplies including water, rice and powdered milk will have been delivered for distribution by Food for the Poor. Below are photos of Navigator of the Seas being loaded with supplies heading to Haiti.
Palettes of water destined for Haiti waiting to be loaded onto Navigator of the Seas
Palettes of water destined for Haiti waiting to be loaded onto Navigator of the Seas
Palettes of water destined for Haiti waiting to be loaded onto Navigator of the Seas
Interested in helping? Royal Caribbean International is working with Food For The Poor and the Pan American Development Foundation. We encourage guests to make monetary donations to either of these organizations which are currently engaged in the relief effort. For even more information on Royal Caribbean’s humanitarian relief to Haiti, click HERE.
The extraordinary situation in Haiti continues and will go on in various ways for years. While this blog is a vehicle for communicating some of the aspects of what Royal Caribbean is thinking and doing, there is no way for a person or a company to truly comprehend the vastness of the tragedy or the needs of the Haitian people. So all we can really do here is give various perspectives on the situation. There are two in particular I want to bring to your attention at the moment.
The first goes by the strange name of sitrep and encompasses the many dimensions of activity occurring in and around Royal Caribbean for the purpose of managing and assisting with this crisis. The sitrep is both a process and a document that occurs every day usually early in the morning. It brings together many, many departments who have an interest and/or an influence on the situation. I only intend to post the sitrep report once but you can assume a version is coming out every day for the foreseeable future. I am grateful to all the sitrep participants, under the aegis of Gary Bald, Senior VP of Safety Security, & Environment.
View today’s sitrep report.
The second is more focused and more meaningful. In fact, it’s unbelievable. I mentioned previously that Maryse Kedar, President of SOLANO, our Haitian subsidiary, was in PAP at the time of the earthquake. By great fortune, she was ok. By Monday of this week she was well along with acquiring a water truck, accessing a supply of clean water and beginning distribution of meaningful volumes of clean water. Her report is attached. There are no words to describe how proud we are of her efforts that are at least commensurate with anything else we know of in PAP.
View today’s report from Maryse Kedar. Photos included.
Interested in helping? Royal Caribbean International is working with Food For The Poor and the Pan American Development Foundation. We encourage guests to make monetary donations to either of these organizations which are currently engaged in the relief effort. For even more information on Royal Caribbean’s humanitarian relief to Haiti, click HERE.
I am proud of what our people and our ships are doing and below John Weis gives some very specific examples of great contributions being made by great Royal Caribbean people and their family members
The ships going back to Labadee, including Navigator of the Seas today, are obviously making a very valuable contribution to the relief effort by offloading supplies at Labadee. The media understand this and generally have written and spoken about the relief effort in positive terms. But in the last 24 hours, sparked by an article in the Guardian in the UK, a different and more critical view has emerged that questions how our guests can justify having a good time in Labadee when there is such misery less than 100 miles away.
My view is this — it isn’t better to replace a visit to Labadee (or for that matter, to stay on the ship while it’s docked in Labadee) with a visit to another destination for a vacation. Why? Because being on the island and generating economic activity for the straw market vendors, the hair-braiders and our 230 employees helps with relief while being somewhere else does not help. These 500 people are going to need to support a much larger network of family and friends, including many who are in (or are missing in) the earthquake zone. Also, the north is going to bear a good part of the burden of the agony of the south, and the more economic support there is to the north, the better able the north will be to bear this burden. People enjoying themselves is what we do. People enjoying themselves in Labadee helps with relief. We support our guests who choose to help in this way which is consistent with our nearly 30 year history in Haiti.
To John:
The team has been working through this holiday weekend and has been in contact with several people on the ground in Port Au Prince so I wanted to focus this blog on the efforts that are taking place there. We have all come to appreciate the resilience of the Haitian people and I think its important to share with you some of the positive things that are happening on the ground that are being coordinated by regular people like you and I.
On the ground in Labadee, the word is that many people are traveling from Port Au Prince to Cap Haitian. For those of you that don’t know, Cap Haitian is about 15 miles from Labadee on the other side of the mountain. A gymnasium there is being used as a makeshift hospital as all the other medical facilities are full and there are thousands of people coming into Cap Haitian to seek shelter, food and water or medical attention. Despite this, the conditions in Cap Haitian are relatively calm at this point and the local authorities and the UN have the situation under control.
Through the good work of David Southby, the Labadee Site Manager and many others, all the supplies that were delivered by Independence of the Seas on Friday have been distributed. We’ve also gone through the site giving up any extra lounge chairs, bedding and mattresses which are now being used in the makeshift hospital. We have also heard from our close colleague and good friend, Maryse Kedar, President of SOLANO, who is in Port Au Prince taking on a leadership role with the recovery effort in her neighborhood. Our thoughts and prayers are with her and David.
The world has understood with intense clarity that the earthquake in Haiti is an event of enormous magnitude requiring a global outpouring of assistance. Initial fund-raising efforts appear to be very successful. The crucial variable is the organization of the relief effort and the ability to get supplies to the people in need. The Royal Caribbean community is touched in many ways by this crisis. One of the primary impacts is on our Crown & Anchor Society members many of whom have been to Labadee and have interacted with our Haitian employees either onboard or at the site. I asked Betsy O’Rourke, our Senior VP, Marketing, to share some thoughts at this juncture and here is what she wrote:
It has been truly gratifying to hear from so many loyal to Royal Crown & Anchor members as the tragedy in Haiti has unfolded. These wonderful people have contacted us with so many well intended ideas for how to help, looking for us to facilitate the delivery of goods and services to those in desperate need. Adam’s involvement with former President Clinton on the economic development of Haiti has been instrumental in Royal Caribbean’s quick response to the crisis. Yesterday our first ship delivered much needed supplies as Independence of the Seas called on Labadee. While we are very fortunate to be able to help in this way, please remember President Clinton’s strong advice to well-intentioned individual donors – please make cash contributions to reputable charities rather than individually attempting to provide supplies.
Today was a day of positives and negatives.
First the negative, the news from Port-Au-Prince continues to be grim. Everyone has seen the news report so I won’t go into this in too much detail. It just makes us all sad.
On the positive side, I’m proud to say that Royal Caribbean today made a minimum commitment of $1 million toward the Haitian relief effort. This contribution will be spent supporting Food For The Poor, the Pan American Development Foundation, and other organizations in Haiti that are engaged in the relief effort. As I mentioned yesterday, the company will be contributing 100 percent of the net revenue earned from Independence of the Seas’ call today at Labadee. We shared this information with our guests yesterday and the response we received from them was very positive. Many guests that have heard about this tragedy wanted to do something and this was good way for them to show their support.
In addition, the first relief supplies were off-loaded today from Independence of the Seas. These will be distributed by the Food For The Poor. Here are some photos that I received from our folks on the ground:
Haiti Relief Effort - Royal Caribbean employee unloads supplies in Labadee from Independence of the Seas
My meeting Thursday morning with President Clinton (Special UN Envoy to Haiti), Dr. Paul Farmer (Deputy Special Envoy) and about 50 other concerned people from the U.S. Government, the private sector and the NGO community had the sense of urgency one would expect under the circumstances. While there is very little of a positive nature at this point in the crisis, President Clinton is clearly taking this catastrophe personally. That has to be a good thing.
President Clinton stressed repeatedly that the overwhelming priority this week is finding the living and dead, attending to the living and respecting the dead in order to preserve life, respect Haitian cultural traditions and avoid a public health nightmare. In other words, first rescue then recovery then reconstruction of the nation.
He and the other commentators also stressed:
- If you’re not a relief worker or medical professional and you want to help, make a cash donation. Cash is king as supplies may not last until they reach their targets.
- Huge unknowns and misinformation are realities of the moment
- Food, water, power, shelter, first aide, lighting and satellite phones are needed. Although all clean water is helpful, reverse osmosis capability would really help.
- The relief and medical workers need quality emergency housing and facilities
- There is great willingness to help. What is required is the organized reception and channeling of aide. In other words, there must be strong communications and logistical support otherwise what people send will not get through. This is a question of coordination and implementation in unprecedented circumstances.
- As intense as the immediate rescue operation is, Haiti needs to begin to develop a long term plan for recovery and reconstruction – short term decisions should be understood in a long-term context if at all possible.
Obviously a well intentioned meeting in New York can only have a limited practical impact on the ground in Port-au-Prince. But I was heartened by a number of exchanges and comments that seemed to resonate with President Clinton and Paul Farmer and may very well make a difference in the upcoming days and weeks. I sure hope so.
I don’t want anyone to miss out on John Weis’ comments, so please check out the previous entry if you haven’t already. We are looking forward to a successful call by Independence of the Seas today (Friday).
Interested in helping? Royal Caribbean International is working with Food For The Poor and the Pan American Development Foundation. We encourage guests to make monetary donations to either of these organizations which are currently engaged in the relief effort. For even more information on Royal Caribbean’s humanitarian relief to Haiti, click HERE.
