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For what it’s worth, we’re already doing that through the state national guard. And other states, apparently. I think there’s diminishing returns on number of helicopters.
From the link:
From a naive perspective, 550 NG personnel seems low. commitments from the other states list three helicopters with 17 crew. Again, that seems kinda low.
Since it's the comparison people are drawing, here's the numbers for the 2010 Haiti earthquake:
Naively, it sounds like they're sending ~1/10th the resources, and that does seem a bit surprising. Maybe the state and federal resources have things under control, so there's no need for NG resources, but that's not what I would expect for a very large and highly unexpected natural disaster.
Either way, I imagine we'll know the truth soon enough: either they'll handle the situation swiftly and in good order, or this will become another insignificant event not worth talking about.
That quake hit about 3M people living in ridiculously poor and dense conditions. It’s a terrible comparison for the electrified, paved, American-standard-of-living Southeast.
Most of the region can receive supplies by road. Same for repairs and evacuations. Areas which are only accessible by air are the exception rather than the rule.
The worst damage is localized to places like Asheville, a tourist city with less than 100,000 residents. As of this afternoon, ~60 were unaccounted for. More people were killed in the Haiti quake than lived in Asheville!
This is an excellent point.
Is your general sense that the cleanup and rescue efforts are proceeding more or less as well as we could ask for? I've heard complaints, but I haven't seen strong evidence either way, nor had the time to track down the details to a level where I could be confident that I understand the actual situation.
On the one hand, partisanship obviously dominates from both ends; the people running things have every incentive to present everything as fine, and the people opposing them have every incentive to present everything as a total disaster. This is complicated by heavy bias in the media, so the default narrative is definately going to favor the people running things in the current situation; the flipside is that any complaints are going to come from the opposition ghetto, which observably has poor quality control.
On the other hand, this is a time-sensitive issue; the three days between your comment and this reply could have been quite significant. If there is actually a problem, it would have been imperative to identify and correct it as quickly as possible.
On the gripping hand, I have no expectation that this can actually be done in a timely manner in the present environment. I mainly want to discuss it now as a marker, and check back in a month or two as the facts present themselves. The problem there, as I snarkily alluded to, is that it seems to me that after-the-fact, sober assessments of what really happened don't actually penetrate, even here. They become old news and people move on, even if the weight of evidence falls hard on one side or the other. There are exceptions; Ymeshkout did what seemed to me to be a very good job hammering election fraud claims, for example, but exceptions don't seem like they're enough.
My sister is currently visiting from an affected, neighboring city.
She reports most of that city was without power and there were lots of downed trees. Still, traffic was redirected rather than stopped, so people were able to get back to work or get out of town quickly.
One of her neighbors was picked up from Asheville Monday because it was in terrible shape. Looters and still no power or water. But it’s worth mentioning that she could be picked up without Katrina- or Haiti-scale congestion.
The death toll remains under 300, and I expect it to stay low. Maybe sub 500. There are no stadiums full of refugees. Water access is still poor, but on the other hand, it’s much easier to get in and out of the area. Regional infrastructure is relatively intact even in cities directly on the path, so long as the geography didn’t funnel water.
I think relief is going about as well as expected. That’s not to say we couldn’t spend more to do more—this is America, after all—but that we aren’t being negligent or incompetent. Not sure how to formalize that as predictions, not ones which would satisfy a conspiracy theorist.
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