Scottwax said:
Kind of hard to move people and heavy equipment into an area that is 80% underwater and accessible via very few roads. Not like we can drop pallets of food and water when most likely, they will land in germ infested water or crash through someone's roof.
Yes, it took too long to get help into the area but mother nature had a lot to do with it as well.
That is not in dispute here. What I was pointing to was the military's ability
to respond to crisis in very short time frame. And even though NOLA maybe
covered in water, there was still a means to get men, supplies, and equipment
into the area. Intel gathering equipment such as low speed, low altitude
surveilance drones could be easily deployed to search out survivors; who
could be picked up via watercraft, or helo. "Gamma goats"
Humvees, and al sorts of other machinery could be used to ford the water to
get to survivors where using a helo might be dengerous (powerlines, etc).
Also, lest we forget, the Army Corp of engineers earn their pay by tackling
problems like this on a regular basis. They can get out pontoons, as well
as deployable bridges to cross into quite a few areas. Even if there
are some folks that cannot be quite gotten to as of yet, they could have
dropped in MREs', small med kits (primarily to protect against infection
from the contaminated water), as well as small bottles of clean water.
Combine just those few capabilities of the US military with that of the local
gov, and there would have been an effective logistics train that could have
gone in and started pulling folks off rooftops and out of attics a lot sooner,
or at the very least, provide some temporary aid to those they can't
pull out quite yet.
Granted, i know there would be a lot of land to cover. There is no
guarantee that everyone could be helped within 24 hours. And
yes, I do understand that mother nature had a big hand in the
slow process. But the point was there was capability to respond already in place.
There is a talent pool of intelligent folk that should've been solving the
problems rather than twiddling their collective thumbs. Instead the powers
that be dragged their feet. And now we may well be looking at not hundreds,
but thousands dead because the means to save them was not mobilized
until almost the end of the week.