The horrific tragedy in Haiti ought to give everyone pause to thank God that they are alive and living somewhere else. The losses are staggering and I wish them all the best to recover and condolences for the incredible losses. I have been involved in several disaster relief efforts in countries as poor as Haiti: Bangladesh and the Philippines for starters. There have been all kinds of discussions about why it is so hard to get the simplest necessities to people, water for example. It would seem like you could simply fly helicopters over dropping evian to everyone. That just isn't the case. Until the USS Carl Vinson arrived today, there was no where to stage them from, and if you want to see riots just start throwing supplies into crowds of people scared to death. The airport is a one runway nightmare that our AF amigos are doing their best to unscrew, and the roads to get pretty much anywhere hardly deserve to be called roads. The 82nd ABN and the AF air controllers are setting up drop zones and landing zones, but you still have to try and push it out from there. Likely they will need to clear and repair what passes for roads and then you need to have some sort of distribution system that doesn't create more chaos as people fight for life-saving supplies. After water the next most important thing to worry about is diseases i.e. cholera. A widespread outbreak could be more devastating than the quake itself. The problem is that common sanitation is not well known and very difficult to enforce in a survival situation. The nice thing is that the US military is well-suited and practiced up on doing all of these things. If they had been the primary response to Katrina it would have gone much better. So the Haitians should be as thankful as anyone in this situation could be that they are so close yet not actually in the US. They will get as rapid and complete a relief effort as can humanly be mounted and that is yet one more reason for the world to remember who comes when they dial 911, it's not the UN it's the USA.
Read the complete post at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Blackfive/~3/iuox3wkpvC0/disaster-relief-in-haiti.html
Posted
Jan 15 2010, 12:10 AM
by
BLACKFIVE