Port-au-Prince, Haiti Oct. 25 (BNA) : Haiti’s capital is on the brink of exhaustion due to lack of fuel, after stumbling despite an earthquake, president assassination, gang violence and mass kidnapping.
More than two weeks of fuel deliveries halted by gang sieges and kidnappings of fuel truck drivers have driven Port-au-Prince residents desperately searching for gasoline and diesel. The fuel is widely used to power the generators needed to make up for the country’s unreliable electrical system.
The city’s major gas stations are located in or near gang-controlled neighborhoods like Martissant, La Saline and Cite Soliel, and some gangs are said to be demanding extortion payments to allow fuel trucks to pass, according to the Associated Press.
Gangs have become a powerful force in Haiti. A gang recently kidnapped 17 members of a US-based missionary group and demanded a ransom of $1 million each for their release, warning that the hostages would be killed if their demands were not met. There is no word yet on their fate.
Gangs have also kidnapped hundreds of Haitians, and the government appears unable or unwilling to confront them.
The protests erupted on Saturday in the Delmas neighborhood as gas stations ran out of fuel. Police arrived and dispersed the crowd with warning shots of what appeared to be live ammunition.
Some of the country’s mobile phone networks suffered a drop in service as the fuel needed to run cell tower equipment ran out.
Officials at St Damien’s Hospital, the capital’s most important pediatric center, said there were only three days of fuel left to run the generators that power the ventilators and medical equipment. The hospital can partly run on solar energy, but that doesn’t provide enough electricity for all of its needs.
Denso Guy, the hospital’s project manager, said Saint Damien is treating two patients with COVID-19 and also handling urgent surgeries, such as caesarean sections.
“I’m very worried,” Guy said. “The situation is very critical.”
“Oxygen runs on electricity. If we didn’t have electricity to run the oxygen and the (medical) machine, we would need to shut down ‘in front of the new patients,'” he said.
Jay estimates that the approximately 1,500 gallons of fuel remaining in the hospital’s reserve tanks will last only three more days.
The hospital usually gets deliveries of about 3,000 gallons of fuel twice a month.
“We called the company, and they said they can’t deliver, and they can’t cross town because of the danger to drivers,” Gay said.
The United Nations Children’s Fund warned Sunday that “hundreds of women and children seeking emergency care in health facilities are at risk of death if solutions to the fuel shortages that have prevailed in Haiti for weeks due to insecurity are not found.”
She said many hospitals across the country have sent appeals for help directly to UNICEF and its partners.
“With the prevailing insecurity in Port-au-Prince, the lives of many pregnant women and their newborns are in danger because hospitals that should provide them with life-saving care cannot function normally due to a lack of fuel. UNICEF Deputy Representative Raoul de Torcy said, “They are in danger of dying if the health services cannot provide them with proper care.”
UNICEF said it has secured a contract with a local provider to supply hospitals in and around Port-au-Prince with 10,000 gallons of fuel. “But due to insecurity, the supplier eventually announced that he could not transport the fuel neither in the Haitian capital nor in other provinces…because many truck drivers no longer accepted crossing roads through gang-controlled areas for fear of hijacking the truck was hijacked.”
Meanwhile, the residents of the capital were in a desperate hunt for fuel. Many gas stations remain closed for days at a time, and the fuel shortage is so appalling that the CEO of Digicel Haiti announced last week that 150 of its 1,500 branches across the country had run out of diesel.
On Thursday, hundreds of demonstrators blocked roads and burned tires in Port-au-Prince to protest the acute shortage of fuel and rising insecurity.
Alexandre Simon, an English and French teacher, said he and others were protesting because of the harsh conditions Haitians face.
“There are a lot of people who can’t eat,” he said. “There is no business… There are so many things we don’t have.”
RAE