Because a society isn’t designed to function around “every man for himself”. Because your attitude would lead to people bleeding to death in the streets because, well, why get an ambulance? Fuck 'em, it’s not me. I don’t even know that guy. Besides, we don’t know if he’ll be able to pay when he gets to the hospital, and if he can’t that’s just more of a burden on the rest of us.
You’d prefer living in an anarchic third-world country? There’s plenty to choose from. And they probably have pretty low taxes, too!
Just a quick thought to add (sorry if this has already been covered).
At first I wondered why the citizens in the Superdome didn’t organize themselves. There had to have been some community leaders in the crowd, I know a few Reverands were quoted. They all just sat and waited, apparently, until the situation became critical.
Then it occurred to me - that’s what being poor is like. A few years ago I was helping a relative who was poor, truly poor, and her days consisted of sitting and waiting. You don’t make appointments to meet aid workers, you show up and sit and wait.
Just like the middle-class mentality says “just hop in your SUV and get the H outta there”, the poor mentality is “if we’re patient, they’ll get to us”.
Of course, it’s the government’s job (local, state, federal) to recognize and respond to all of their citizens, not just the ones of a desirable demographic.
Nice job sniping off half of my post. If you’d have bothered to read the other half I cover why I do believe that we should be doing something to help those who, for whatever reasion (smart, not smart, not able, whatever) did not get our or are unable to take care of themselves.
Sure you can. Perhaps dropping them into the middle of the city willy nilly isn’t a good idea, but there are known locations that you can use as staging points inside the city. That’s assuming that you have some type of coordination, and have someone that has a clue in charge of it. And even if you do decided to just drop the supplies, with no ground assistance, the key is to do it a lot. Not just drop one or two crates, but innundate the area with food and water.
From my understanding, the airport was pretty much in good condition, so they could have staged from there to transport supplies to the city center. And there are a lot of heavy hauling helicopters that could be used. From this link, there are several helicopters that are curently in use by the marines that can haul up to 50 tons for short distances. Those are the units that should have been dispatched. Even a handful of those types of transports moving back and forth could have taken a huge amount of food/water to the city.
As oppsed to aircraft like the C-130 and the C-5? Both of those aircraft can haul a great deal of supplies into the area, more than enough cargo capacity to make a real differance, then could also be used on the return trips as evacuation methods, transporting people out of the area, while bringing supplies in.
Sure you don’t need to have them right on the coast, but 100 miles inland isn’t that far in real terms, close enough to get the supplies there fairly quickly. You can’t tell me that there aren’t any locations in that 100 mile radius that are secure enough to have staged supplies at. Again, lack of adequate planning before hand is to blame.
I don’t think anyone is saying that medical personel should have rushed in and been first on the line. What I do think is that they could have had a 5 or 10 thousand troops on the ground to help with security, and assisting the police. Enough of an armed presence would have curbed some of the armed gangs roving the city.
They were able to get the buses in to evacuate from the dome, they also could have used the helo’s to move in shallow draft zodiacs to use to help patrol and rescue people from the flooded sections of the city. If people are able to return to certain sections of the city, there must be some skeleton methods of roadways that are passable.
As another poster said above, why there wasn’t a detailed plan in place somewhere marked “New Orleans Hurricane” is beyond my understanding. While it may not have been possible to cover every eventuality, there certianly could have been a rough idea of a plan in place. "Ok, we’re going to need to get a lot of things in and out of the city, and roads may not be passable, so we need to notify the 3rd helo squadron out of somewhere, USA to be on standby, and they can stage at these three potential locations…ect ect. ect. "
As I said before, I can understand being taken aback by the sheer scope of the disaster for that first day or so, but there is no way it should have taken till Friday to get the major movement of manpower and supplies to the city.
Atrael – sorry you caught onto my post 4 days late. My argument is to why there is little to no support for the initial 48-72 hours. There after there a lot of blame to go around to a lot of people.
Pardon me for being lazy, this argument has been carried out much futher in there relevent pit thread. Feel free to look there for more topics of discussion.