We basically did this in Northern Iraq with the kurds. At the end of Operation Desert Storm thousands of Kurdish refugees were on the brink of starvation in northern Iraq and refugee camps in Turkey. The 5th Quartermaster Detachment was deployed from Germany to Incirlik Air Base, Adana, Turkey to conduct emergency airdrop of relief supplies into northern Iraq. Rigging and airdrop to the Kurds lasted from 7 April to 1 May 1991. At the end of this operation the Detachment had rigged over 7,600 CDS bundles and packed over 6,700 parachutes.
No, in the case of Germany, we built runways using steel grids and tar which was maintained continuously with local labor. this was back in the day of using civilian tail-dragger side loading cargo planes. We now have rear door c-17’s and c-130’s that are specifically designed for air drops.
I’m sure by the time they get there more people would have died horribly pinned in the rubble for days. This isn’t a function of only needing X number of rescuers, it’s a function of getting as many rescuers as possible as soon as possible. There are wounded people buried in dust choked buildings with no water or food.
the world is standing around with it’s thumb up it’s ass because we can’t unload food and water fast enough and that is a logistics problem. We have bigger and better equipment than we had for the Berlin Airlift and we’re doing a piss poor job of using it.
The solution is to take 2 problems and solve them with one solution by air dropping water and food directly at the beginning of such disasters. It is just that simple.
Aristide is seizing the opportunity to try and return.
Haiti has such a long history of oppression and violence. Trying to help them is going to be tough. The gangs and warlords will seize the aid and try to sell it.
I feel bad for the innocents trapped in this nightmare.
Magiver, please do a better job of quoting me, specifically, do not attribute to me words I did not say. In this case: “They’re dropped by individual parachute” - those are your words, not mine. I’m going assume this time that you did that by accident.
Again, though, these were dropped into fields, NOT directly on top of tents or crowds. In Port-au-Prince there is no open field - any that existed are now covered with people. There is no where for people to go to get away from falling objects. Even if you didn’t cause a panic, which could easily lead to people being trampled, these folks have no way to dodge stuff falling out of the sky. I certainly wouldn’t want to be hit by even a small water bottle falling hundreds of feet, I can’t imagine anyone else would. I suppose I’ll take severe and multiple bruises over dying of thirst, but your “solution” isn’t going to be all wonderful.
Uh-huh - did we have to clear away the rubble of 3 and 4 story buildings off the runway areas first? How fast were those runways built? How do you propose to get the grids and tar to Port-au-Prince in the first place?
Frankly, parking an aircraft carrier in the harbor (which is due to happen this very afternoon) seems a MUCH more practical way to bring additional air capacity to Port-au-Prince quickly that attempting to clear land and build a runway from scratch. I just don’t see the latter happening in less than days.
I understand that. The problem is utilizing air drops without injuring or even killing people on the ground. The usual practice is to drop stuff where people aren’t, in a cleared area. WHERE in Port-au-Prince does such an area exist?
Yes, we all know that. We are told, repeatedly, about people calling out from the rubble, still alive and still trapped. However - there is NOTHING to be gained by overloading the one working airport to the point an accident occurs. Even if you had every available rescue team in the world on the ground, right now, you will still not save everyone. A LOT of people are going to die simply because no one could get to them in time. I don’t like that. I assume nobody likes that. However, I don’t see anything to be gained by refusing to confront that ugly, ugly little fact.
Even with a world wide effort thousands of people have died, are dying, and will die this week. I think that’s an example of a “disaster”.
The world is NOT standing around “with its thumb up its ass” - compare this mess with Katrina if you want to “thumb up the ass” behavior. For Katrina we really could have done something for those people, but they were left to rot. For Haiti, though, I just don’t see what more can be done.
But let’s review, one more time:
no passable roads, reports of pavement buckling 5 feet high, equally tall mounds of debris elsewhere
almost no fuel for vehicles or heavy equipment
no power
no reliable communications other than word of mouth
no open land to allow air drops.
Apparently a few helicopters have managed take-offs and landings to evacuate the injured.
Haiti just didn’t have a lot of helicopters. Until supply ships with fuel and a means to unload that fuel arrive fuel to run them is extremely limited. Again, the arrival of an aircraft carrier this afternoon should help. Said carrier also has more choppers, this, too, will help.
But even if the roads weren’t full of debris, weren’t folded up into origami, and there was fuel and heavy moving equipment and power tools you will STILL not save everyone trapped. There are just too many people and too little time.
So you can jump up and down and scream “It’s not enough!” (which it isn’t) or take some solace in that some will survive who, without help, would have died.
We have to get the equipment there first. And that last bit of the trip, through a destroyed city, is the hardest leg of the journey. And when it is there we need fuel to keep it running.
Sure - drop hard, solid objects directly onto panicked, injured people. Yeah, good plan. :rolleyes:
Broomstick, I’m not sure what you don’t understand about the word parachute but it is not a logistic problem to parachute 8 oz bottles of water or food. Here is a video of what small-pack air drops look like without a parachute. Same principal with a small parachute attached.
Beyond the use of small package air drops they can do drop and go pallet runs on a street which only requires a helicopter’s worth of soldiers to set up. The ground doesn’t have to be runway level they just need a straight run for the plane to approach. There are certainly many of these sites in the suburbs surrounding the city where the houses are small and away from the roads.
As for the airfields, you bring them with you. In this case you build onto the only airfield that Haiti has. Their biggest problem is a lack of ramps and that is how you extend the airport’s logistical use. Google Earth the airport and you’ll understand why the flights are backed up. It’s a single 9700 ft runway with no taxi-ways and little ramp space. It’s apparently so backed up that they won’t even STAGE the rescue team into the arena. They could be sitting on a ramp in Miami ready to go.
As for the aircraft carrier that’s coming into the harbor, it is a helicopter ship and is an exponentially expensive use of assets. It’s needed for the evacuation of people. Helicopters are poor transporters of freight. One pass with a C-17 would drop more goods than the carriers ships operating all day long. Water and food are cheap commodities compared to fuel and it would be much more effective to air drop the first week.
I understand what parachutes are. I have also seen air drops such as in the linked video. Again - they were dropping packages MUCH larger than I would want to land on me into open fields. As you point out, there is no evidence of teeny tiny parachutes.
DO we actually HAVE any such “small packs” already equipped with parachutes? If we don’t, how long will it take to assemble them? And how many can we make in 1-2 days, which is the time frame you’re looking at? So far as I know we don’t have warehouses of parachute-equipped food aid ready to go.
And, of course, parachutes don’t always work. An 8 oz bottle of water dropped out of an airplane with a failed parachute is a potentially lethal object - no wonder the preference is to drop stuff onto open fields.
If there was absolutely no other choice maybe that would be acceptable… IF we had the proper parachutes and IF they could be assembled in time to save lives.
Then HOW are you going to get the stuff into the city? It’s the exact same problem faced by the supplies at the airport: all the roads are blocked. It doesn’t matter if you bring stuff into the airport, the port (if it were functional) or roads from outside the city - you can’t get past the rubble in the roads quickly.
As it is the Dominican Republic IS sends convoys of trucks via ALL passable roads from their borders to Port-au-Prince. Given that the first convoys drove into Haiti the morning after the quake they had to have been up all night loading and fueling and staging the first trucks. In other words, aid is coming from literally all directions right now - but again, the problem is that once you hit the city proper the streets are wrecked and that last leg to get to actual people in need is the longest of all time wise.
The problem isn’t just how many flights you can get in or out - the supplies already there are stacked up and backed up because of the difficulties in getting stuff from the airport to where it is needed. Sure, bring more flights in - until you deal with the ground transportation problem it won’t do any more good. The problem is STILL that last leg of the journey.
Although yes, arguably if the the food and water and medical goods are stacked up unable to move then bringing more search and rescue teams might be a good move. I’m just glad I’m not the one actually making such decisions because no matter what such people do someone is going to be unhappy.
But weren’t you the one suggesting using helicopters to set up cleared areas for pallet runs? Just no making you happy, is there? They’ve got to get the helicopters THERE in order to make room for such pallet runs. Hence the aircraft carrier.
And why not carry water and food on a medivac going into the city, then unload the goods while loading wounded, then fly out the wounded? Wouldn’t that make more sense then just sending in “empty” medivacs? You’d get two things done on each flight that way. Sure, it’s an expensive way to get water and food in, but if that’s the only functional means right now shouldn’t we be doing it? Isn’t that why people are being asked for monetary donations, to help pay for such things?
How about we take that with a grain of salt or two? I can think of a couple explanations for that.
People have been stacking the dead alongside roads for days now. Could such a stacking be mistaken for a roadblock?
Haitians have been using bulldozers and dumptrucks to remove large number of bodies. Could these men be stacking bodies to make them easier to load into trucks?
Should we expect completely rational and logical behavior in people who may have had no food or water for 2 days, who have been through an epic disaster, and who may have had many or most of their family killed?
Did any of these witnesses actually talk to any of the people making these alleged roadblocks, asking them what’s up, or did they just make assumptions?
To balance these sorts of reports out, there are also reports of people helping their neighbors out, and of peacefully forming queues for what few supplies are being handed out. I would expect a mix of behavior under such circumstances, from the very best to the very worst.
I know this is the weird thing to be struck by in this photograph, but it’s odd that so many of them seem to not have pants on. I mean, considering the situation, I understand that things fall off and such while moving the bodies, just that’s what stuck out to me.
I wish to link to some photos of people clearing some such “roadblocks”. In these pictures, from what I’ve been able to find out, these bodies were delibrately brought into the streets to make it easier to load them into bulldozers and trucks so it wasn’t a roadblock, it was a clean up operation.
WARNING! EXPLICIT, GRAPHIC PICTURES OF DEAD PEOPLE - CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK
So, again, I question whether these “roadblocks” are actual roadblocks, or part of clean up operations. I think we need to be careful how much we assume, and how much we take as truth as the situation is still clearly very confused and chaotic.
As for missing clothes - if someone stripped a dead body for useful items, perhaps to make bandages for someone injured but alive, I ain’t saying jack about it. If someone took a pair of shoes from someone dead because their own feet were bare I ain’t saying jack. If someone took a pair of pants because their own were shredded I ain’t saying jack.
Is some actual thievery going on? Oh, yes, I’m certain - but most of the taking is probably survivors just trying to keep surviving.
The local news just showed footage of a mass cremation, dozens of bodies, not all of them in bodybags, burning in an open pile. This is like something out of a horror film.
They must clear the dead both to make the streets passable, and to protect the living from all the problems that can come from stacks of rotting bodies.
"A senior Haitian official said Friday that the death toll from the earthquake that flattened the country Tuesday could reach 200,000, the Reuters news agency reports.
“We have already collected around 50,000 dead bodies; we anticipate there will be between 100,000 and 200,000 dead in total although we will never know the exact number,” Bien-Aime told Reuters. A senior Haitian official said Friday that the death toll from the earthquake that flattened the country Tuesday could reach 200,000, the Reuters news agency reports.
So they already have 50,000 and they know there are thousands more still burried. This is getting worse than I ever imagined.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta reported this afternoon that the medical teams are having to pull back because of rioting. That’s baffling to me. These people are there trying to help and it’s already getting dangerous.
Gupta discusses the need to shut down a field hospital because of the danger.
You’d think someone saving your kids lives would be appreciated.
Hospitals in, say, Chicago have security guards because injured or ill people and their friends/relatives do not always act in a rational and sensible manner. I can only imagine that under the circumstances in Port-au-Prince people are even more irrational and emotional than that. Frightened, traumatized people are not always capable of gratitude.
Apologies if I missed a similar sentiment, but it’s late…
And it just struck me: all of the Americans I’ve (personally) read/heard about on the news who were in Haiti before the quake were there as aid workers of some kind. No tourists, no businessmen, no family visitors, just aid workers.
I don’t know what the military normally uses for parachutes but trash bags make great canopies for water bottles (I tried this after Katrina with 12 oz bottles) and they have a reuse function as waterproof shade and containers to carry stuff. I don’t see the need to do this for an 8 oz water bottle that is flat packed like the supplies in the video. Those flat packs are going to leaf down by themselves. Attaching parachutes is…… a matter of logistics. It’s not rocket science.
As a pilot you should be aware that even if everybody alive stood in the streets they wouldn’t take up much space in the city. As it is they tend to congregate in tent cities. It’s a simple matter of finding a couple of streets that are relatively empty and securing them for a couple of minutes for a 100 foot pass of small-pack supplies. The coordinates are given to the pilot and an artificial runway is created electronically. I’ve done this with my own plane to find grass strips. If I can turn base blind and locate a runway on short final than a military pilot could do it at night in a fog. It’s not even a challenge.
Healthy people cannot exist in 80+ deg sunlight without water. Injured people who are bleeding aren’t going to make it past the first day. People with dysentery aren’t going to make it through the first day. Old people aren’t going to make it past the first day.
Flying supplies to an airport is not a relief program, it’s a staging program. You might as well bring body bags or bulldozers if it takes a week to deliver the basics because dead people don’t need food or water.
I’ve been to Haiti as a tourist. I went with my mother in the late 1990s. Her idea. We went over Christmas for about a week because it was cheap, accessible, and tropical. We had a great time with zero bad experiences. The people were very warm and friendly, and made an effort to communicate even if they had no French, only Kreyol. I don’t know why more people didn’t visit: it was no more dangerous than Tijuana, and there was beautiful scenery and beautiful art, and the hotels were really nice. (We had dinner in the Hotel Montana one night.)
