New York: Terming the destruction in Haiti as "unprecedented", a senior UN official has said it is the most serious challenge posed to the world body so far and methods of providing relief have exceeded their capacity.
"As devastating and terrible as those tragedies were, the complexity of this, the scale of the response required for this earthquake exceeds those and exceeds anything the UN has ever faced," Anthony Banbury, the acting second-in-command on the ground, told journalists here.
He said problems after the Tsunami and Cyclone Nargis had been complex to fix, but the 7.0-magnitude tremor in Haiti was unlike any problem the UN had confronted.
The earthquake struck the poor Caribbean nation on January 12, killing more than 200,000 people, rendered over a million homeless and largely destroyed capital Port-au-Prince.
The UN also suffered its single biggest loss with more than 90 of its personnel, including the mission chief, killed in the earthquake.
Some relief has been provided to the city that lost most of its infrastructure and plagued by problems of sanitation, housing, electricity water and piled up rubble.
Banbury said the traditional method of dealing with problems within the `cluster system` is not working in Haiti.
"The structures that have been designed by the United Nations over many years based on experience for disaster response, mainly this cluster system -- we`ve exceeded the capacity of this system," he said. A "cluster system" was set up in 2005 comprising a group of UN agencies to deal with problems in the affected areas such as housing, water sanitation, health etc.
"We need to solve all the problems simultaneously. These problems are very very complex," Banbury noted.
The rainy season, which will set in Haiti in May, is expected to aggravate the problems as thousands of people are still living on the roads under make-shift tents.
The UN has noted that while some arrangements have been made for these people, dealing with the monsoon is will be a challenge.
"We have a long way to go and it will be a difficult road ahead of us," Banbury said.
PTI
