AP Enterprise: U.S. botched Haiti flights to Florida

MIAMI — As hundreds of injured survivors of the Haiti earthquake overwhelmed Florida hospitals in January, state officials pleaded with the federal government for basic information about arriving patients but got little assistance, e-mails obtained by The Associated Press show.

More than two weeks after the quake, Florida officials warned they could not treat any more victims. In response, the American military abruptly halted medical airlifts, saying Florida had refused to take additional patients and provoking a bitter exchange over who was responsible for the delays.

"I have advised the federal government that until we see a plan for the future transportation and care of these patients that Florida could not agree to accepting more patients," the state emergency management chief, David Halstead, wrote in a Jan. 28 e-mail. "We have been forced to daily react to last-minute requests to accept large number of long-term care patients."

Nearly five years after Hurricane Katrina exposed serious flaws in the nation's disaster-response capabilities, e-mails obtained by the AP under Florida's open-records law show state and federal officials squabbling over where to send patients while an epic humanitarian crisis unfolded hundreds of miles to the south.

The picture that emerges is somewhat at odds with the one put forward by the Obama administration, which worked intensely in the weeks after the earthquake to mount a faster, more organized response than that of the Bush White House following Hurricane Katrina.

Moira Whelan, a spokeswoman for U.S. Agency for International Development, the agency leading U.S. relief efforts in Haiti, said the federal government worked through Florida's concerns during an unprecedented response to an international disaster.

The Jan. 12 earthquake killed more than 230,000 people. More than 18,000 survivors were evacuated to the United States by the end of January and more than 31,000 by the end of February. Hundreds ended up in hospitals in Florida, the nearest U.S. state.

Hospitals in three Florida counties alone accepted more than 450 quake victims in January, before patients were flown to the Tampa and Orlando areas.

While not an exceedingly large number in itself, those patients added to the hospitals' strain at the height of the snowbird season. They also arrived at the same time as tens of thousands of football fans flooded South Florida for the Pro Bowl and Super Bowl.

Within 10 days, the state was struggling to manage the influx of evacuees, the e-mails show.