Most societies have some sort of organised physical and psychological reserves ready to help them through disasters.

Haiti is an exception, a place impoverished financially and institutionally for reasons going back deep into history (notably French history).

Only a massive military-style humanitarian intervention can make a difference in Haiti, and only the Americans have the resources and generosity to make that difference. Well done the Obama administration.

There also are contingency plans in place as led by the United Nations to try to coordinate international efforts in such ghastly circumstances, so that resources are not wasted in ‘unnecessary duplication’. ‘Clusters’ of assistance forms are set up. 

The problem they are trying to solve is that in real life some forms of assistance can be delivered faster than others, for either reasons of geography or available supplies.

Yet it makes no sense to ship in (say) huge numbers of tents and bags of food if there is no way to get those supplies distributed; those piles of assistance in the few available storage centres themselves can start to block more essential supplies which have taken longer to arrive. Getting relief supplies into a country is the easy bit – distributing them sensibly and with minimal fairness thereafter is always far harder.

And it’s all made worse if the local authorities are unable to cope at the best of times – who from outside leads the operations and takes moral and legal responsibility when things go wrong, as they invariably will?

In short, terrible confusion reigns, and many more people die.

Development expert Chris McDowell is one way in to the complicated world of clusters and how the relief effort in this case can be followed online.