No more tents for Haiti. Plastic sheets instead.

International aid officials at first announced a campaign to put the homeless in tents and appealed for donations from around the world. Some 49,000 tents had reached Haiti when the government announced Wednesday it was opting for plastic sheets.
With an estimated 1.2 million people displaced by the earthquake — some 770,000 of them still in the capital — officials say there is no room for family-sized tents with their wide bases.
Besides, they are bulky and don't last long enough to justify their cost, the aid community has decided.


The officials are mobilizing a plan they call the "shelter surge:"
• By May 1, one plastic tarp will be given to each of about 250,000 displaced families.

• Transitional shelters of 18 square meters (194 square feet), with corrugated iron roofs, will then be built. They will have earthquake- and storm-resistant frames of timber or steel and are supposed to last for three years.
But putting up such shelters will take serious time and effort. Land must be procured.  Money — at least $1,000 per transitional home — must be found.  And desperate people who just weeks ago lost their homes must be persuaded to relocate yet again, and getting them to abandon neighborhoods and friends won't be simple.  (Keep going down to watch a video of what those shelters look like)

"This is a big problem. We need to move people and they need to agree to move," U.N. Under-Secretary-General of Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes said after visiting tarp cities in the quake-decimated city of Leogane.
Getting even the bulk of that done before the June 1 start of hurricane season seems unlikely. And plenty of people — including politicians from donor nations as well as today's tarp-dwellers — are concerned.
The European Union said Thursday that it would mount a military operation — including heavy equipment and engineers — to level the ground for the shelters and put them up. It did not say how many troops would be sent, by which nations or when.

A delegation of visiting U.S. lawmakers led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi raised concerns over tarps in a Friday meeting with President Rene Preval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive.
"We can't just put tarps up in those low-lying areas and hope for the best," said Senator George LeMieux, a Florida Republican.
Preval declined to answer questions about the problem after the meeting. But in a hushed voice, he expressed concern in side conversations with aides.
Asked about tents vs. tarps, Pelosi simply replied: "That's a decision that has to be made here."
Ironically, many of those charged with deciding are themselves sleeping in tents.

Watch a video of Indonesia after the 2009 earthquake there and get an idea of what those transitional shelter with corrugated iron roofare like.  (You'll only get this kind of investigative reporting on PVS)