Don't Blame The Government

Unless you are an expert on relief, don't critize the government. When a disaster is as big as many countries can you understand the complexity of getting food, water and relief to an area so large.

How big is the disaster area. It is as large as the entire United Kingdom, made up of England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. It is almost as large as the entire state of California and larger than Kansas. When you are part of the relief effort you find the intrastructure, interstates, highways, and most government agencies are now gone.

Did you know hotels in Birmingham, Atlanta, Montgomery, Jackson, and other cities are filled with the 80% of the population that were told to leave the Gulf area. The civic centers in Birmingham and other surrounding metropolitan areas are filled with people who sought shelter from Katrina. The news media has spent little time interviewing the 80% that left and soon will be like the one's we see taken out by bus or helicopter, will need help in finding jobs, homes, and apartments. Some of the large churches here in Birmingham have campus domitories and they too now are filled with people from the Gulf area.

The ability of the military to get help into an area this large is a stategic nightmare. I served in the CG at Corpus Cristi, Tx and on a CG Cutter Unimac, and assisted people who had accidents with water craft and accidents on shore. But we were limited the what we could do based on our personel and supplies immediately available. We assisted people after a storm once and found we exhausted our supplies almost immediately. Plus, our mission to protect the country could not be compromised. That said, I have seen some of what the services are running into right now.

Supply Chain. The perimeter military can help with available supplies immediately but you cannot overextend yourself until you have a supply chain established.
National Guard. These are people just like you and me and when Katrina hit they were civilians doing their jobs and taking care of their families. You can activate the guard but it takes time to get all your unit to the center. Then it is getting your mission established with calls going out to establish your resupply chain. This takes time.

Coast Guard. The units out of Texas and Arkansas were there immediately but gasoline and fuel were a main concern. The helo's have about 4 to 4.5 hours of fuel on board and that time includes traveling to the disaster area and fuel to get back to where fuel and power is available. That limits the time on station to less than 3 hours. They can bring gas tanks by air to the perimeter of the damage area and/or tankers to refuel the helos by air. But coordinating this takes time.

Help One, Help All. We fly into an area and practice a triage of helping the worse cases first. This is difficult with no phones, no radios, no ground information, only what we can see from 100's of feet in the air. We cannot fly into 'mobs' like at the Super Dome as we can't help 'all'. It is hard to pick and choose but the first responders are and were CG helo's and that is all we could do.

I apologize for rambling with my thoughts this morning but can you remember how long it took to prepare for 'Iraqi Freedom'? It tooks weeks and months of planning and someone spoke each morning to tell us how things were progressing. This could not and did not happen in NO, Biloxi, or anywhere on the Gulf. We are fed by the talking heads on the netword and cable networks who do not understand nor do they want to understand how the military was limited at the beginning of this effort to save 'all' the people. If you read this, I hope there was a seed of truth to help you understand what is going on...jeff

 Jeff N,

I have one PS to add to my original post. I have read about the head of FEMA and don't recall the guys name but he managed an Arabian Horse Society before becoming head of FEMA.

How did he get his job? Now I find out he was room mate in college with W's campaign manager and through that association he was 'nominated' for head of FEMA. I have since found he did not list his 9 years at the Arabian Horse Society on his resume?

Now I have great reservations about how he acted and how soon or how late? I really think now we did not fail the people in NO and MS and Alabama, it was some of the higher ups in FEMA who failed. Heads may roll on this!/Jeff