 |
 |
 |
My Opinion on Hurricane Katrina - The Failure to Help
1 September 2005
By Shelomo Alfassa
I am shocked by the horrific tragedy going on in the state of Louisiana and even more so by the slow response by the United States government. They have demonstrated a failure to respond properly. The US government remains distant and not in communication with the people who are suffering and even dying. I saw the images of people dead in their chairs, bodies piled up, a baby that died because of lack of water and intense heat. This is not India, this is not a country in Africa, this is the United States.
We have the capability to drop cell phones and radios over Afghanistan, Kuwait and Iraq, so we have the capability to do the same here. When the news media reports there is a lack of communication with residents who are stranded on their roofs or shouting for help, there is no excuse for the government not to respond. If we can communicate with Islamic jihadists on the ground in Asia through paper leaflets, then we can drop leaflets over a major city to communicate with US citizens. The White House needs to send someone over to Kinko's to make a few thousands photocopies and I bet we can find over 100 private pilots that will jump at the chance to help and drop them over the city. This is no exaggeration!
The government has U.S. Marine Expeditionary Forces sitting in California ready for missions on air, land and sea. Members of the Marines sit in uniform on a daily basis, ready to respond anywhere when needed. These are warfighters, dressed and with rifle in hand, ready to launch on a moment's notice. Why could we not have deployed some of these Marines in the first 24 hours, before the rapes and shootings started? The Marines are experts in water, they have thousands of amphibious floating tracked vehicles that will protect them from small arms fire while they patrol in the water. If they hit a submerged object, they could drive right over it.
The Army base in Fort Hood, Texas is the largest armored base in the world! They have 339 square miles of pure manpower and equipment. This includes one of the largest brigades of military police and medical support in the US. Why has the president not sent soldiers and supplies the very next day after the storm?
Homeland Security said they sent 40 federal medical teams as well as specialty teams. I was a commander of one of these specialized medical teams that are now part of Department of Homeland Security but in the past were of the U.S. Public Health Service and FEMA. I can tell you first hand, these teams are INSUFFICIENT for this type of cataclysmic disaster. I participated in both field and tabletop exercises; I know their capabilities and limitations. These teams are for disasters, but not on this scale. We need the military! We need the U.S. Army to set up field hospitals on the open fields in the fenced in areas of the airport, in the outlying areas that are not submerged. We need a couple dozen Marine Corps helicopters, CH-53's from Yuma, Arizona that can each carry 55 people. We need to drop a small crew of air combat traffic controllers, and then bring these choppers in one at a time to evacuate people. Run the people on board, take off, and send another chopper in its place. Repeat.
Day one after the storm, hundreds of thousands of individual meals-ready-to-eat, the standard military ration should have been dropped by the military. We have tens of millions of these floatable meals in the US, ready to be eaten but sitting on pallets in military warehouses. If we can drop them out of airplanes into Sudan and Afghanistan, we can drop them into New Orleans. No excuses!
We can drop water, we can drop disinfectant, we can drop radios, we can drop cell phones, we can drop men, but we have dropped nothing as of day four. Political correctness, racism, indifference, these are all variables that at different levels have added to the continued and growing bowl of infected soup that New Orleans has become. When the Mayor of New Orleans three days after the hurricane is declaring they have a "desperate SOS" to the world media, and the police are declaring that the police stations are under attack by roving gunmen, we should respond. Minutes not hours, hours not days. George Bush's dreadful speaking ability does not inspire confidence, on the contrary, it promotes only weakness and insincerity. Shame on the president, he is the man in charge with the power. He could have done something.
