So far, all risk-management teams have been able to do is get people—aid workers and reporters mostly—into earthquake-damaged Haiti. The next step is getting their clients’ people out.

And the task is maddeningly difficult, said Charlie LeBlanc, president of ASI Group, the security subsidiary of Medex Global Group, a global risk-management company that works with companies and nongovernmental organizations to deal with disasters and other risks of being abroad.

“It’s been challenging, to say the least,” LeBlanc said of dealing with the aftermath of Tuesday's devastating earthquake, which killed at least 45,000 to 50,000 people, according to the latest estimates. “A lot of what we’ve been doing right now is getting people in, whether that be disaster-recovery groups or media groups. Getting people out is not so smooth…. The infrastructure has been decimated. It’s frustrating when I have airplanes going in full and out empty.”

But his company has significant experience with disaster. It is one of the few firms that provide services for companies that work abroad that include such things as extraction from disaster zones, as well as intelligence and other emergency services.

ASI works with eight of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies, as well as many small and mid-sized businesses, on managing risk.

“In these types of situations, similar to the (2004 Indian Ocean) tsunami, you deal in time frames not of hours but of minutes,” LeBlanc said.

So far, he said, he has clients with some 500 people in Haiti who they are trying to get out, and he expects that number to climb as the time ticks past. But LeBlanc added he expects that number to grow to about 750 in short order.

He also has airplanes and helicopters able to fly into Haiti from next-door Dominican Republic, which is separated by a mountain range from Haiti and escaped the devastation that has been visited on the neighbor that shares the island of Hispaniola.

LeBlanc has been able to fly in at least a little food and medicine to Haiti—his company was flying people and supplies into the stricken island nation within 12 hours of the quake. But even when it comes to flying in aid such as medicine, there have been glitches. Because the entire society has been so affected, confusion reigns when it comes to getting aid to the right people.

“We’re bringing in medicine, but who do you give it to? The biggest problem has just been communication,” he says.

And hospitals and doctors are standing by in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere to help those of his clients who are wounded. And they’ll be desperately needed, LeBlanc said. “The medical infrastructure in Haiti is just decimated,” he says.

But as of Thursday morning, there was no protocol for getting people out of Haiti. LeBlanc is hoping to reverse that trend before the day is out.

John Rendeiro Jr., vice president Global Security and Intelligence for International SOS Assistance Inc., another provider of security and medical services for Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and academic institutions, said his company had a team on the ground and was also preparing to evacuate those in need as soon as it could.

“We have the advance elements. We have a security presence and a medical presence coming in,” he said. But he added that just locating people—finding those who need medical attention or who are missing—is going to be a tall order.

“It’s early stages,” he said.

And LeBlanc was also hoping, for the sake of the Haitians, that the port at Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, would be able to open by Friday so that ships could bring in the heavy equipment needed to sift through the rubble and find and hopefully save trapped people. What heavy equipment there was in Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, was largely destroyed in the 7.3 magnitude earthquake.