Back [url=http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1545874#1545874]here[/url], timber wrote:Help was "On the way" before the storm hit ...
Massive assets were pre-positioned, and tremendous preliminary work was done ...
Quote:This is the latest information from the Associated Press on Hurricane Katrina.
Sunday, August 28th
CLANTON, Ala. (AP) - Selma will serve as the staging area for federal disaster relief supplies for Hurricane Katrina victims in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, Gov. Bob Riley said Sunday. Supplies also are stockpiled at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, he said. "I've spoken with President Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff, both of whom have assured me they will offer any assistance we may need to recover from this devastating storm," Riley said in a statement released by the Emergency Management Agency at Clanton headquarters. Alabama also has pre-positioned supplies, sent National Guard troops to Mobile and Baldwin counties, and opened storm shelters. Riley said the state already has 290,000 bags of ice, more than 250,000 gallons of water, 652,000 MREs (meals ready to eat), and 110,000 tarps measuring 20 feet by 25 feet. State EMA Director Bruce Baughman said 14 rescue teams are on standby and 26 emergency shelters, including three for people with special medical needs, are open across the state.
Now, this is Thursday, August 1. Katrina hit the coast on Monday, August 29, and raged throughout the day, rendering the impact area totally inaccessible. Not untill Tuesday, Aug ust 30, was it even possible to begin assessing the damage and directly responding to the calamity. Among the first of the observed effects was that the entire transportation, communications, and power infrastructure were gone and area emergency services assets were themselves devastated, equipment gone, without communications, and with many personnel stranded by flooding and road ruin, unable to assemble and react, and most equipment destroyed, damaged, or missing. Apart from that, it was discovered New Orlean's levee system and pumps, thought secure, in fact had failed catastrophically. Hundreds of thousands were homeless, scores of thousands were stranded and in need of rescue.
Meanwhile, Guard and Military units alerted and/or called up prior to the storm's landfall had to be prepared for deployment, then actually deployed to the area. By Tuesday evening, they were beginning to arrive, by Wednesday, August 31, they were pouring in, and as of today there are tens of thousands, with their equipment and with tens of thousands of tons of supplies on-scene, already being distributed. Federal spending in direct response already has reached a Half Billion Dollars a day.
To bring aid to those who need it in the nearly 100,000-square-mile disaster area, roads and bridges have to be rebuilt, airport runways have to be cleared of mountains of debris, those in need of the aid must be located, resources must be inventoried and scheduled for dispatch, and order must be restored. Physical provisions must be made for the on-scene bivouac and logistic requirements of the responding military. Facillities to receive the evacuated must be secured and prepared (which, among other things, means calling in additional staff and laying in of additional supplies), and contingencies of most unexpected and extreme nature must be met and accommodated. While the victims have suffered horribly, and continue to suffer, never before in history, anywhere else in the world, has so much been done for so many in so little time. The recovery has barely begun, already has reached historic proportion, and will continue to swell at unprecedented pace.
Yes, the situation is desperate. Heroic measures have been undertaken to address the situation, and heroes are giving their all to the effort. Much needs to be done - unimagineably much. Much has been done, unimagineably much. And all this has been accomplished in unimagineably short order, under unimagineably difficult conditions. And while needful things are being done, some folks carp and whine about things in the real world being not as they might wish for them to be.
Damn that real world - its an inconvenient, ucooperative, very unutopian place.
