Nasa

[steelish]

While I agree with most of your statements in this thread I think some of what you are saying here is just outright wrong. I'm not sure if its just your media portraying it this way and you don't have easy access to accurate information on this but the facts show whether home or abroad Americans (particularly at the government level) are very often slow to respond to disasters. New Orleans had offers of aid from Cuba and many other countries before the US made an official response. There are other examples where most of the G2X (whatever X is these days) had responded before the Americans.

As part of a disaster response team I can assure you, there are reasons rescue personnel don't rush right into a disaster and start working. There has to be cohesion between responders, there has to be organization, and there has to be a realistic approach. It's easy to criticize when watching on television and seeing people sitting on rooftops awaiting someone to come along and rescue them. I agree, why not paddle in, get the people, and paddle out.

Properly trained personnel have to be assigned to do these types of things, otherwise not only do you have the original people in need of rescue, now you have the people who attempted to rescue them in need of rescue themselves. Unseen dangers were everywhere in New Orleans...downed power lines, cars, bodies, sewage, street signs, small trees, etc. all submerged and ready to cause havoc with not only rescuers, but those being rescued. There were unstable buildings, aggressive animals (displaced wildlife such as snakes, rats, spiders, etc. - some of which were poisonous). There are rescuers who are trained to go into unstable buildings and search. Searches had to be done in an orderly fashion so as not to cause double the work. Records of what had been done and who had been rescued, from what house, etc had to be put on paper or in computers. Many people have no clue the amount of "engineering" goes into a rescue operation and I myself was once guilty of sitting on the sidelines and scoffing at the length of time it took to respond.

America is nothing if not innovative. Due to the outcry for faster response after Katrina, the U.S. has adapted an organized response system that is much quicker than before. That being said, a state in which a disaster occurs still needs it's Governor to ask the President for help before we can be deployed by executive order.