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Briggs recounts Haiti experience
Alan Sloan - Thu, Sep, 2, 2010
One Haitian boy, one of more than a million January earthquake victims, begged Farragut’s Dr. Richard Briggs: “‘please don’t leave, I know you’ll take care of me.
‘If you leave I know they’ll cut my legs off.’”
Briggs, a nationally renowned thoracic surgeon who performed that craft worldwide during more than 30 years in the U.S. Army, remembered those desperate words after being part of a 17-person rescue team witnessing one of the worst natural disasters in recorded human history.
“There’s some days we’d amputate 75 or 80 legs,” added Briggs, District 5 Knox County Commissioner, during his Haitian earthquake slide presentation before Concord-Farragut Republican Club Thursday, July 1, in Seasons Cafe.
Serving roughly “two to two-and-a-half weeks” in Haiti after first arriving about two weeks following the quake, Briggs pointed out the team was fortunate to find a hospital operating room and its supplies mostly intact.
However, “I was shocked by the destruction,” Briggs said, adding that in Port-au-Prince — with half of Haiti’s population — “There was no place you went where it wasn’t just literally utter destruction.
“Within minutes of the earthquake, a quarter of a million people were dead, a half-million people were injured and one-million people were homeless.”
In the ghettos, “People really suffered where they built homes on the side of hills,” Briggs said, adding signs were everywhere, “‘We need help’ with food, medicine, water” along with cries to help get relatives out of buildings.
Briggs said “huge camps” sprang up where “bed sheets and tarps — whatever they could find — were used to provide themselves with shelter.”
Victims “did not want to be inside” for any reason, including for treatment.
Even the wealthy in Port-au-Prince whose homes weren’t seriously damaged “didn’t want to go back inside their homes,” Briggs said.
Because of damage at one Port-au-Prince hospital where Briggs and others performed surgeries, “tarps and tents” in the parking lot served as patients’ recovery areas.
While pointing out that rain would have greatly magnified the problems minus available shelter and victims’ fears of going inside, Briggs said Haiti was “fortunately” going through its annual dry season.
Skin grafts also were performed regularly.
Briggs said there were “very, very sad stories of children dying of disease,” adding sanitation issues are “something they’re still struggling with.”
Chief among that was dealing with the huge count of dead bodies.
“These big dump trucks would come by ... they’d put them in the trucks ... and take them out to a big landfill,” Briggs said.
Of the 176 nations worldwide, Briggs said Haiti ranked as the 170th poorest — poorest in the western hemisphere.
“They’re never going to rebuild it,” he added.
Briggs and his fellow rescuers had to scramble looking for food, adding a handful of the 17 rescuers “got really, really sick.”
“I was really, really careful what I ate,” Briggs added. “Every day we had to send people out to scavenge for food. The Haitians didn’t have very much to eat, either.”
The commissioner and few others stayed the duration. After two days, five left.
“They said this was not their thing,” Briggs said of the five, not counting other team members leaving due to illness contracted on-site.
Ed Whiting, club member and Farragut Municipal Planning Commissioner, told of the challenges his son, Navy Cmdr. Edwin Whiting, faced as part of a two-month military rescue effort.
Deployed “to help set up logistics support for the military,” Whiting said his son helped “get the port back into operation.”
But the commander paid a price.
Becoming sick from “a parasite that you acquire from dead people,” Whiting said his son needed three months to recover.
The earthquake, measured at 7.1 on the Richter scale, “As far as one place ... probably the most damage, death and destruction that occurred [worldwide] in the last 400 years,” Briggs said.
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