Hurricane Katrina

That would be great, but not real easy unless they can do something about all the armed gangs and looters. The logistics would be very difficult to overcome otherwise. In an urban area like that, there can’t be helicopters flying around willy-nilly and landing anywhere and everywhere, there has to be traffic control or there will be accidents and more senseless deaths. Only a certain number of helicopters can land in one area at any one time, so a sufficient load of supplies cannot be put down in one fell swoop. I would think that the armed gangs would be trying to take control of any supplies that are put down, which means people are going to get killed. They’d have to have heavily armed troops guarding, to control distribution. How do they get the troops in? More helicopters, meaning more air traffic, and less that can be utilised for carrying supplies and evacuating people.An awful situation and logistical nightmare, but I guess it is what they are faced with at the moment.

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On the 7th day, God was arrested.

My thoughts exactly.

I certainly hope not. I’d really like to see something better done, I was just speculating on the problems that be have to be overcome. Yes, but that would appear to have it’s problems too. To drop supplies, there needs to be places to drop it. In Africa there are big open spaces of dry ground to drop things on. In a city, a flooded city no less, there are few good drop zones, and if food supplies were to be dropped into flood water full of corpses, waste and god only knows what else, could be more harmful than good. Then there is still the issue of the armed gangs. Which makes me wonder why so many of them are in Iraq.Anyway, I certainly don’t want to defend the inaction of the powers that be, I’m just trying to visualise what they have to work with. It’s really quite tragic that they have to work out how to deal with these issues now, after the fact, when some contingency planning before the fact may have dealt with at least some of them. Hundreds of lives may have been saved.

Agreed, but they have to get them into the area, and they are big and heavy and not real fast. I think the major marine bases with large numbers of amtracks are on the east & west coasts near the major naval bases (and then one wonders how many of them are being used in Iraq). But I guess it goes back to the planning issue. Having some amtrack units based near major population centres during hurricane season would have been a good piece of forward thinking. Maybe something to think about for future planning.