Israel’s Daniel Biran tells how he brought rescue team to Haiti

Thursday, February 25, 2010

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Israel’s go-to guy tells how he brought rescue team to Haiti

By stacey palevsky

Days after the earthquake that destroyed Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12, an Israeli team of rescue workers, doctors and nurses began the difficult and demanding work of setting up a field hospital.

At the forefront of that effort was Daniel Biran, officially Israel’s ambassador of administrative affairs who oversees 28 embassies in North America. Unofficially, he is Israel’s go-to logistics man for global emergencies requiring an impromptu field hospital, having worked in Kosovo, Greece, Turkey and Argentina.

Israel was the first country to set up a field hospital after the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti.

“I am not a doctor, but my job is to see that the doctors can work,” Biran said Feb. 18 during an official administrative visit to San Francisco. “If we were not there, the people [we were helping] would be dead in the street.”

Biran arrived in Haiti on Jan. 14 via Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. After his plane was rerouted, he and the other members of the Israeli advance team took a U.S. military helicopter into Port-au-Prince.

“Everything had completely collapsed,” Biran recalled. “People didn’t have anything. Bodies were all over the place. There was nowhere to bury the bodies.”

Immediately, he and his colleagues began laying the groundwork for a field hospital. That meant finding a location (which ended up being the backyard of one of Haiti’s few Jewish residents), unloading the equipment, communicating with New York and Jerusalem and making sure the medical staff could function in the 90-plus degree heat.

Eighteen Israeli civilians and 218 reserve soldiers built and maintained two surgical tents, a pediatrics tent, a radiology tent, and a tent for newborn or premature babies.

“The hospital was ready in eight hours, and we were quickly flooded with hundreds of patients,” Biran said.

Israeli doctors and nurses treated more than 1,110 patients in Port-au-Prince.

Once the Israeli team realized just how tenuous the situation was, they erected one more tent — for patients who had been treated but had no home to which they could return.

“Usually, after medical treatment, you tell the patient to go home, to shower, to keep [the injuries] clean, but in Haiti, where can they do this? How? It’s impossible,” Biran said.

The international media gave wide coverage to Biran and the Israeli medical and rescue professionals for their efficiency in setting up a functioning hospital and dispatching search-and-rescue teams.

During the Israelis’ stay from Jan. 15 to 27, the team treated more than 1,110 patients, did 319 successful surgeries and delivered 16 babies, including three by caesarean section, according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The IDF search-and-rescue force led or participated in the rescue of four individuals.

Because airplanes could not land safely in Port-au-Prince, most medical and other supplies — including kosher food from New York — were sent to Santo Domingo, then trucked daily into the Haitian capital.

“The Israeli army eats kosher food even in emergency situations,” Biran said. “We had Shabbat dinner and even brought challah.”

Biran fell into logistics work while stationed at the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, when a suicide bomber blew up a pickup truck nearby.

“I had left the building six minutes before the bomb, but my wife had been inside,” Biran recalled.

He worked outside the embassy, calming fears and arranging for supplies or resources for the injured. Meanwhile, his wife was unaccounted for. While helping victims of the bombing, his mind raced with thoughts of her funeral and explaining her death to their daughters.

Ten hours later, his wife was found. Injured, but alive.

These emergency jobs “maybe are not so normal, but I am attracted to them because I like to help others,” Biran said. “Why does Israel help? Because it’s in our soul.”