Trucking Responds to Earthquake in Haiti, With Donations, Transportation Assistance
By Michele Fuetsch, Staff Reporter
This story appears in the Feb. 1 print edition of Transport Topics.
Within hours of the devastating Haitian earthquake, the president of TEC Equipment Inc., a chain of West Coast truck dealerships, received an e-mail from an employee asking, “What are we doing about Haiti?”
A week later — thanks to what he said was an extraordinary effort by his employees — Dave Thompson personally piloted a team of doctors and nurses from TEC’s home in Portland, Ore., to Port-au-Prince on the company’s jet.
The estimated cost of the round trip, $35,000, was paid by contributions from the firm’s employees.
“They’re the ones that made it happen,” Thompson told Transport Topics in an interview shortly after returning to Portland.
“I may have been the motor to make it go, but they’re the ones that provided all the support and encouragement to go do it,” Thompson said.
Since the Jan. 12 quake, trucking industry executives and employees have been raising money, donating transportation and logistics services and finding creative ways to partner with customers and suppliers to aid in the global relief effort.
A truck hauled enough fabric to make 12,000 blankets from Devens, Mass., to Goodwill Industries in Miami, thanks to free shipping by NFI Industries Inc., Cherry Hill, N.J., said Ted Chelis, spokesman for the carrier and logistics firm. The fabric Goodwill will make into blankets was donated by manufacturer Polartec, an NFI customer.
Dot Foods, a food carrier with a fleet of 700 trucks, is working in conjunction with its food suppliers to provide 100 truckloads for Haiti. Dot will move the food to Miami, where Food for the Poor will ship it to Haiti.
Like several private and for-hire trucking firms, Dot, Mount Sterling, Ill., is matching money raised by its employees.
The biggest problem facing Haiti and those trying to help it lies in getting supplies into the island nation and, once there, distributed.
The Port-au-Prince airport is the only freight hub fully operational. The seaport, save for one pier, was destroyed and much of the road system lies under rubble.
Supplies are being flown into Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, but the road from the Santo Domingo airport to Port-Au-Prince is so backed up with trucks carrying supplies that the approximately 240-mile overland trip takes 18 hours, said Ray Schaible, vice president of operational logistics at LMI, a nonprofit consulting firm in McLean, Va.
The Haiti airport is operating at 175% of capacity, so getting a landing slot can take days, Schaible said last week.
“The last I heard, there were like 1,000 aircraft waiting to be cleared in,” he said.
Thompson said his TEC jet got a priority landing slot because it carried medical personnel affiliated with a group already on the ground, Medical Teams International.
Thompson said the airport was like a staging area in a combat zone — “managed chaos” with jets continually arriving and departing, supplies piled high under netting, forklifts moving loaded pallets and helicopters lifting the pallets into the air and on to relief stations.
Despite the logistical nightmare in Haiti, the relief effort by trucking continues.
Bekins of South Florida, a Bekins Van Lines agent, is donating labor and transportation services ferrying medical supplies bound for Haiti to Florida ports and airports.
“The immediate need in Haiti is so tremendous and, given that we have the means to pick up these needed relief supplies, we’ve sprung into action,” said Joseph Sabga, president of the South Florida Bekins agency.
Greg Swienton, CEO of Ryder System Inc., announced that Ryder’s charitable foundation would match every dollar donated by Ryder employees to the American Red Cross.
Ryder also set up a dedicated online donation link on its Web site, and the firm is responding to requests flowing in for help in shipping relief supplies, said spokeswoman Cindy Haas.
UPS Inc. announced its charitable unit would donate $1 million to the relief effort, with $500,000 in cash donations to various relief groups and another $500,000 in shipping services.
Likewise, FedEx is donating a total of $1 million in cash and in-kind transportation and logistical services. The company said that it was transporting medical supplies for World Vision, the American Red Cross, Heart to Heart International and Direct Relief International.
FedEx trailers hauled water purification equipment from a nonprofit group in South Carolina to Miami, where the solar-powered units were flown free on a FedEx cargo plane.
At Schneider National Inc., Green Bay, Wis., spokeswoman Janet Bonkowski said employees were donating to the relief effort and Schneider was donating transportation for medical supplies on behalf of Project CARE.
Wisconsin truck manufacturer Oshkosh Corp. said it was donating a total of $50,000 to Haitian relief efforts, half to the Red Cross and half to Doctors Without Borders.
“We hope that in some small way, our contributions will assist the relief effort as Haitians are forced to deal with the horrific circumstances,” Oshkosh CEO Robert Bohn said.
TEC’s Thompson said that the American response to the Haiti relief effort was so widespread that a fuel supplier in Wellington, Kan., where the plane refueled on its trip, gave him a large discount.
When Thompson and the medical team landed for the fill-up, they were greeted by a camera crew and town leaders, who had prepared a luncheon for everyone onboard.
