Starbucks and water and gas! Oh my!

[shades]

I posted this another board, and think it is approproate to remember when some (outside the disaster area) who have complained about why it took so long for relief to come.
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Having served in the military for several years, I might add a little perspective on this. The amount of disaster relief flown by the US "in far flung places" is not even a day's worth of relief necessary in this disaster.

This is the largest airborne lift in history. Consider just the issue of helicopters. How many does it take to move people out? Hmmmm, let's send a hundred helicopters. Okay, most of them are Blackhawk's which might carry 10-12 people. So, now how far do the helicopters have to fly to get to the region? And where will they land? And what ground crew will accompany them? And where will there re-fuel? Yes, air-to-air allows a little flexibility. But fly a helicopter 8 hours, with one refueling already, and how many more can you do? And what about maintenance on these helicopters? They are not like cars or pickups - they require routine maintenance, or you will have dead bodies scattered around.

Now, suppose they could carry water/food in on each return flight into the area. Where does the food come from? How much was available within helicopter flying distance of the disaster area? How much food was packaged so that it would be usable when delivered?

What about flight control? Who coordinates this? I remember in the Navy a flight operations for 30-40 aircraft was a major accomplishment for 6-8 hours of combat. And there was no interference from other flyers. What about Coast Guard, NG, Navy, Air Force?

And the longer it goes, the more urgent medical needs survivors need to be transported elsewhere.

Oh, yeah, and then snipers enter the picture? Shooting at doctors, military, police, civilians?

And some want all this rescue effort accomplished for 700,000+ people [remember NO is only one city affected, granted the largest, but what about Biloxi, Gulfport, and all the smaller towns in the region] in 24-48 hours? Obviously, some of these complainers have never packed food/clothing for more than a rainy weekend at the fairgrounds.

 

[shades]

This from an April 2005 issue:

Popular Science

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It takes Scott Kiser only a split second to name the one city in the U.S., and probably the world, that would sustain the most catastrophic damage from a category-5 hurricane. "New Orleans," says Kiser, a tropical-cyclone program manager for the National Weather Service. "Because the city is below sea level—with the Mississippi River on one side and Lake Pontchartrain on the other—it is a hydrologic nightmare." The worst problem, he explains, would be a storm surge, a phenomenon in which high winds stack up huge waves along a hurricane’s leading edge. In New Orleans, a big enough surge would quickly drown the entire city.

.....

New Orleans has nearly completed its Hurricane Protection Project, a $740-million plan led by Naomi to ring the city with levees that could shield residents from up to category-3 storm surges. Meanwhile, Winer and others at the Army Corps are considering a new levee system capable of holding back a surge from a category-5 hurricane like Ivan, which threatened the city last year.

To determine exactly where and how high to build these levees, the engineers have enlisted the aid of a 3-D computer-simulation program called ADCIRC (Advanced Circulation Model). ADCIRC incorporates dozens of data points—including seabed and coastal topography, wind speed, tidal variation, ocean depth and water temperature—and charts a precise map of where the storm surge would inundate New Orleans. The category-5 levee idea, though, is still in the early planning stages; it may be decades before the new barriers are completed. Until then, locals had better keep praying to Helios.

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[Andrew Fergus]

And this from the National Geographic in October 2004 :

As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.

The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.

A