Didn't y'all hear? There were some idiots in NO that were *shooting* at the helos that were coming in to help!
Laura, that didn't happen to several days in. I'm not talking about the later stages, but early on. What still continues to puzzle me was why there were no helicopters flying in the first couple of days. Long before such shooting incidents. And if they had come in timeously with relief and rescue, instead of waiting till five days later, it's doubtful the situation would have deteriorated to the point where snipers and armed gangs roaming the streets would have become the problem it is now. In the early days, it was just some unarmed looters in supermarkets. If the NG had been brought in right at the start, they could easily have neutralised that threat, nipped it in the bud.
Yesterday, I saw a little bit of a report with a reporter in Biloxi. She pointed out that she and her crew were amazed to finally see the first FEMA, ARC and National Guard arriving just that morning. She and her crew, she pointed out, had been there for days.
And, of course, she was right. As Wendy pointed out in her post, reporters have been swarming all over NO in helicopters shooting footage since about two hours after the event. Granted, some of them would already have been there pre-hurricane to film that, but not all of them. A huge no. - especially overseas reporters whose editors would not have paid for them to helicopter into NO just to film the hurricane, they'd rely on US footage for that, and did - came in right after the storm left. Half of the UK's news reporters have been reporting from NO all week. I think most of them started reporting live there from Tuesday. If they could fly into NO from the UK that early on, so could American aid agencies.
If they could get in by helicopter, why couldn't helicopters to drop food/water/medical supplies to those poor people dumped on a concrete overpass for example? And I'm not just talking at an official level. Don't the cities/states surrounding the affected ones have air ambulances? Helicopters? How much does it take to go to a warehouse, load up with bottled water, get in your air ambulance and fly? How could you not, watching the pictures unfolding on your TV?
Nor am I sure I'd accept the excuse that helicopters couldn't land. I saw one do it yesterday - the one which just dumped food out and then left again. And again I'm not talking about later, when things obviously got very dangerous for relief crews thanks to the shooting, lawlessness and I don't blame them for having difficulty then, but right at the start - the golden 72 hours, the first two days. And as far as those poor people dying on the overpass goes, you have a very large stretch of flat concrete road there. They couldn't land on that? Or hover and airdrop? The state governer said on TV yesterday that she'd been asking for a 'Berlin drop' for days. That shouldn't have been difficult. They can do it all over the world, why did America prove logistically impossible?
LabRat
