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Unless you think the loading and unloading happens at the runway itself, the point stands.
A 50% reduction of available runways is not the same as 50% airport throughput reduction, because the throughput of an airport is almost never limited by runway availability. This is why targeting runways is and of itself so rarely effective in a war, and why it's more important to target hangers and loading areas near the runways. Unless the runways are actually being constantly used at maximum capacity- which there is no reason to believe given the video's own lack of use of the still-active runaway and instead focus on a loading area- reducing runways is not what limits functional throughput.
This is especially true when a specific airport itself is not required to reach the end destination, which in this case is not Greenville but the places in Tennessee the video was claiming the flights were going to. There is no requirement for aid being flown to Tennessee to fly via the Greenville airport, because the aircraft flying to Tennessee via Greenville could fly via other airports. Fixed wing flights through Greenville could drop 100% and it wouldn't necessarily entail fewer goods reaching or passing through Tennessee airports.
No, that was a shock-line opening of a genuine criticism. If the location is planned to be an aid distribution center, part of the plan's merit is how it plans to received aid to distribute.
Rotor wash is not an issue of aviator incompetence, it is the mechanical consequence of how helicopters fly in the first place. If you have any desire to receive aid via airlift, you need to plan your reception sites around those limitations. This means you need to not actively create aircraft safety hazards like FOD. There needs to be a place for helicopters to approach to either land or- at the very least- hover to hoist down pallets.
The issue is that the distribution point set up in the middle of a parking lot with an apparent lack of planning for receiving stuff by air. A parking lot is normally an excellent location for an impromptu helicopter zone. It's naturally flat, open, few obstructions to create rotor backwash, and naturally connected by and to roads for disseminating any goods downloaded from an aircraft quickly and efficiently to staging areas.
Instead, the on-site actors have made a functionally ground-only delivery reception point... in a disaster where ground-logistics were significantly degraded.
In order for that distribution point to receive any benefits from airlifted supplies, the airlifts will need to find somewhere else in the general area that meets helicopter requirements in order to unload. To reach the distribution site, those pallets will then need to be loaded on new vehicles, to be driven to the distribution point, which will then need to unload from the vehicles before it can be distributed.
This is not only doubles the number of logistical sites and loading logistics (forklifts, teams, etc) needed to support receiving aid, this also negates one of the advantages of air-lifted supplies in the first place, which is that they can be packaged in ways to facilitate fast dispersal that doesn't need forklifts that may be limited in a disaster area.
A pallet of rations air-lifted to a site doesn't necessarily need a forklift at all. If you have a surplus of bodies compared to forklifts- as is visible in the video- boxes of high-value/low-weight aid can just be directly carried off until the wooden pallet is all that is left, which can be picked up and moved elsewhere. This is far, far better in a disaster context than imposing a requirement to lift the pallet 5+ feet into the air (to put it into a truck for transport).
But this can't be done, because of how the organizers of the site have taken and chosen to use a parking lot. Which includes their choice of tent placement and not security it (or trash).
Now, maybe there are extenuating circumstances. Maybe that lot is the only one in the area. Maybe there are no resources to secure tents. Maybe there was literally nowhere to drag the loose trash that was just left in the middle of a distribution site, no man-hours or volunteer teams to move refuse to dumpsters to clear up more space, no time to plan or prepare for how to receive aid, no space to do things otherwise.
Or maybe they were using unsecured tents as sunroofs in the middle of the parking lot because it was convenient, and left trash in place because moving it was inconvenient, and didn't think through what that would mean if/when they become potential recipients of helicopter delivery and someone was sent by to do a check.
I get that 'FEMA bad, local volunteers good' is the narrative of the cycle, but this is what bad implementation looks like. Good implementation may be hard, good implementation may be beyond what can be expected, but good implementation is not what you are seeing if you are looking at the ground in that video.
In the specific instance I've seen, the volunteers were actively trying to signal to the helicopter not to land and were specifically closing that particular area to airlifts.
Also, that helicopter did not land. It just washed the area by flying low and they flew away. This seems more like a lack of situational awareness on the part of the pilot than bad logistical planning.
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