( CNN ) -- It has become a commonplace that it is hard to comprehend the disaster in Haiti . If so , and if we hope to provide Haitians with anything like the help that they need , then we must understand where our minds fail us . One problem that we do not yet face is having our compassion numbed by the sheer magnitude of the calamity . Indeed , it has evoked a deep visceral response , as we see graphic images of individual suffering on a background of mass devastation . When our local tea store is devoting 20 percent of sales to relief and cell phone donations keep pouring in , the scope of the tragedy is mobilizing , not paralyzing . The threat to our compassion comes , rather , from feeling ineffective . We risk that failure if we can not grasp the realities facing Haiti . Here , we face two deep mental challenges . One is that we must struggle to comprehend how many interdependent threads of Haiti 's social fabric have been ripped apart . People lost family , friends and communities in an instant . Children were orphaned in a nation already struggling to care for many orphans . Hospitals , factories and government agencies disappeared . Essential aid organizations lost brave people and resources . Communications and transportation were ruined , including the port that brings almost all goods into the nation . Here , imagining ourselves in the Haitians ' plight might help . Can we imagine trying to recover , if our country faced the most massive disaster in its history , without work , food , medicine , transportation , commerce or government ? The second challenge is that our minds also struggle to reason quantitatively about events beyond our normal experience . Here , a back-of-the-envelope calculation might help . Assume , plausibly , that everything that 3 million Haitians need must be brought in from outside their country for a period of time . Assume that each Haitian needs 5 pounds of goods per day ( food , water , medical supplies , soap , cooking fuel , the gasoline needed to distribute these supplies and more ) . Assume that everything must be flown in ( at least until the port can be reopened ) . That means 15 million pounds ( 7,500 tons ) of airfreight per day . If a cargo plane can carry 75 tons , then that means 100 flights per day , or one plane landing every 15 minutes , then having its goods unloaded and distributed to victims across the country . One way to understand what those numbers mean is by analogy . The Berlin Airlift was another crisis that required a massive mobilization to supply an isolated population in desperate need . Berlin was cut off by a hostile power , rather than by an ocean . It was devastated by war rather than by an earthquake . Its 2 million citizens needed roughly 5,000 tons of goods per day , delivered through limited entry points , over distances comparable to those of Haiti 's island neighbors . The airlift required an unprecedented logistics operation , which Soviet and East German authorities believed impossible . It encountered serious organizational problems in coordinating American forces among themselves and with our allies . It drew resources from other military theaters . It was enormously expensive , in both money and the lives of aviators . In some ways , supplying Haiti is easier . Technology is vastly improved and the world much wealthier . But in other ways , supplying Haiti is even more difficult than the Berlin Airlift . Berlin was occupied territory , under Allied military rule ; while Haiti has little functioning government , and those trying to help are struggling to work out their division of labor . If we are not thinking in terms of an effort as massive and risky as the Berlin Airlift , then we have not gotten our minds around the problem . Unless we grasp the complexity and magnitude of the task , then we may be expecting brave , dedicated relief workers to do the impossible -- and be disappointed when they can not do it all . As a nation , we may fail to support our leaders in providing the sustained resources that the mission requires . If our collective imagination and our sense of history fail us , then we will not achieve the results that our compassion demands -- and will fail Haiti and its people in their long , difficult road to recovery . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Baruch Fischhoff and Kathleen Tierney .
The earthquake devastated Haiti 's families , social networks and economy , authors say . They say it 's difficult to conceive of the dimensions of the need . The U.S. and others will have to supply essentials of life for a time , they say . Authors : In some ways , the aid operation is equivalent to airlift that sustained Berlin in 1940s .