Alan de Herrera

Haiti Earthquake 2010
U.S. Navy's humanitarian Aid

OC Register

From afar, the island looked deceptively calm. Except for some curls of smoke climbing into a blue Caribbean sky, Fullerton native Alan De Herrera saw no sign that an earthquake had rocked Haiti three weeks prior.

It was Feb. 3 and De Herrera, a photographer and documentary filmmaker, was looking at the ravaged island from aboard the USS Bataan, an aircraft carrier anchored about a mile off the coast of Port-au-Prince.

“It looked so peaceful… but you’re just not close enough to see everything that was going on,” says De Herrera, 38, who was there to document the U.S. Navy’s efforts to aid earthquake victims.

The next day, however, when De Herrera went aboard the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort, he saw first-hand just how brutal the earthquake had been. He photographed children whose faces had been partially crushed by falling rubble. He saw amputees and fatalities. He saw kids with scars that would be tough to heal; kids who’d lost their parents.

As helicopters ferried the critically injured to and from the hospital, De Herrera, working in the bowels of the ship, watched in awe as a huge medical team helped a seemingly endless stream of victims. In all, the hospital treated 871 patients during its roughly two-month humanitarian effort in Haiti.

At one point, medical crews were running 10 operating rooms at full capacity.