capital Port au Prince are relying on the capabilities of dozens of rugged, all-terrain vehicles shipped from Gibraltar. Toyota Gibraltar Stockholdings [TGS] is one of the world's leading suppliers of customised project vehicles to the United Nations and non-governmental aid organisations. Whenever there is a disaster anywhere in the world, the phones in the company's offices on Devil's Tower Road start ringing. Fred Burgod, the company's sales manager, told me that the first call came within hours of the Haiti earthquake on January 12.
Early on the morning of January 13, Medecins du Monde, a French organisation that sends doctors into trouble zones, placed an order for Haiti. A flight was leaving Bordeaux for Port au Prince the following day and the team of doctors needed two vehicles fully kitted out to work in extreme conditions.
Within hours, TGS mechanics had fitted powerful radios and essential equipment to the Toyota Land Cruisers, the vehicle of choice for these situations.
"The only way to do it was to drive them Bordeaux ourselves," Burgod told me in an interview for the Gibraltar Chronicle.
"Four hours after the phone call, the cars were on the road."
After that, the orders kept on coming in. As of this week, TGS had handled order for 82 vehicles for delivery to Haiti.
TGS has longstanding relationships with UN organisations and NGOs; the company is geared up to deal with precisely this type of emergency demand.
The system works like this: Cars arrive from Toyota factories into the port of Sagunto, near Valencia, and are trucked down to Gibraltar to be converted and fitted with accessories as per customer needs.
The customisation process takes on average fourteen hours per car and can involve ambulance conversions, rewiring to fit radio transmitters, even armouring a vehicle for travel in war zones. The vehicles are equipped with all sorts of kit needed to survive in off-road, difficult situations.
TGS holds stock to last a couple of months at a time and, once converted, vehicles are trucked out again to Spanish or Portuguese ports for onward transport. On occasion, depending on the urgency, units have been shipped by air using giant Russian Antonov freighters flying out of Málaga airport.
"We knew the floodgates were going to open for us," said Michael McElwee, marketing and sales administration manager at TGS. "We knew there was going to be a huge amount of activity in the coming weeks."
It is now just over two weeks since the Haiti earthquake and the rhythm of demand for vehicles has changed.
Aid agencies are now starting to plan ahead and are ordering vehicles that will help not just in the present context, but also as part of a long term reconstruction program. Air freight is expensive and no longer necessary. The cheaper, more cost-effective alternative is transport by sea.
But the docks at Port au Prince are ruined, forcing TGS to find an alternative route.
Vehicles are now being shipped through Algeciras to Caucedo, a port in the neighbouring Dominican Republic. From there it is just a few hundred kilometres to ground zero across the border in Haiti.
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