“The Next Day,
Everything Was Flat”
OEHS Professionals Confront Devastation in Haiti
BY ED RUTKOWSKI
Jennifer Hornsby-Myers, CIH, OHST
NIOSH
The magnitude 7.0 earthquake that
struck Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010, was
strong enough to cause heavy damage
even to earthquake-resistant structures,
according to the United States Geological Survey. In a country like Haiti, the
poorest in the Western Hemisphere, the
quake’s effects were catastrophic. It
struck in the afternoon, when many
Haitian children were in school. The
epicenter was a mere 16 miles from
Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital and
largest city, where more than 700,000
people lived. According to the stories of
survivors available from many online
sources, the shaking lasted for nearly a
full minute. Multistory buildings collapsed; whole neighborhoods were destroyed. The Haitian government put the
death toll at 230,000, with another
300,000 injured and 1 million homeless.
The gravity of Haiti’s predicament
elicited responses from dozens of governmental and non-governmental aid
organizations across the world. Even an
agency such as the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC), which
operates primarily in the U.S., sent several personnel to Haiti to help with recovery efforts.
One of those personnel was Jennifer
Hornsby-Myers, an industrial hygienist,
AIHA® member, and Commander (CDR)
in the U.S. Public Health Service. As re-
gional operations director for the NIOSH
Emergency Preparedness and Response
Office in Morgantown, W.Va., Hornsby-
Myers was deployed as a CDC liaison to
the U.S. military’s Joint Task Force-Haiti,
or JTF-H. Her job was to advise JTF-H
on public health issues—malaria and
other diseases, infections, post-operation
treatment of amputees, mosquito con-
trol, the movement of survivors. “I was
basically an interpreter or facilitator,”
Hornsby-Myers explains. “CDC has
many public health assets. The military
really doesn’t—that’s not what they do
for a living. So [my role] was to help
both sides understand what the other
brought to the table.”
Hornsby-Myers was familiar with the
military from her first job as a civilian
industrial hygiene technician at Ft. Det-
rick in Maryland. In one of her first
tasks as a professional, she participated
in a health study of soldiers who
worked in tanks, loading long-range
shells into the cannon breech. For many
years the shells had been wrapped in
lead foil, and soldiers who opened the
breech after a round was fired would
get a face full of lead dust. Research had
shown that these soldiers exhibited all
of the effects of high lead exposure, in-
cluding a higher rate of birth defects
among their children, so the Army
switched to an organic tin foil. “We
went back and did a study to make sure
the organic tins weren’t a problem, and
they weren’t,” Hornsby-Myers says. She
credits the project for starting her on a
lifelong career in industrial hygiene.
Fundamentals
Hornsby-Myers left the snow and cold
of Morgantown on Feb. 11, arriving
hours later in the rubble of Port-au-Prince. It was her first foreign deployment, and one of just a handful for
NIOSH. In 2005 she had taken part in relief efforts following Hurricane Katrina;
her job then was to coordinate NIOSH
resources requested by the states. In
Haiti, by contrast, the U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID) and
the military were very much in charge.
Asked to compare the Gulf coast
post-Katrina and Haiti post-earth-quake, Hornsby-Myers pauses; it’s clear
there is no comparison.
“The similarities are, they’re both
tragedies,” Hornsby-Myers says. “The
differences are huge. First of all, you’ve
got over 230,000 people dead in Haiti.
Occupational safety and health and
basic human needs—I don’t know how
to say this—you could address them
with Katrina. You had resources. In
Haiti, those resources were slim to none.
