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I'm reposting a top level comment that got posted yesterday, because I don't think it got enough discussion.
I want to add, as I commented, I am beyond frustrated by the federal response. Biden just put out a press release today, over 5 days after it happened, and he just sounds so tired and apparently has a cold. That being said, he says a lot of the right things even if the delivery is bad.
But why has it taken so long to get things out there? As another commenter said, why aren't planes and helicopters air dropping supplies and Starlink in?
And if there has been a major relief effort, where is the news on it? The left controls pretty much the entire mainstream media, so where are the videos of airlifted supplies? I know internet is out, but people on X have shared plenty of videos of waters washing away homes etc.
I'm just shocked at how poor the response has been, though I guess I shouldn't be. Also man, those videos really are something to watch. Reminds us how fragile things really are if Nature decides to make us face her wrath.
I think we’re lead by incompetent people. We just plain lack the ability to solve any of these kinds of problems. Biden gave an interview and claimed to be leading from the beach because he’d been on the phone with Homeland Security for two hours. That’s barely trying in my opinion. What amazes me is that we have a lot of disaster relief programs out of Fort Bragg (or whatever it’s been renamed to) and nobody seems interested in using those resources at all.
Counterpoint: I have always felt and continue to feel that the top leadership can't actually do much that's useful in the immediate aftermath. Right? It's the type of thing that reliably happens somewhere at some point in the US every. single. year. Without fail! Most people whose job it is to help, are helping, and I don't really think that someone with very little background in disaster relief is going to be much help, and in fact might just hurt responses by doing the equivalent of C-suite meddling.
A governor can probably do something useful, but the President? Their job is mostly in the aftermath: if they can pass a recovery bill, and if so how much $?
The president controls air assets that could be used to airlift supplies to isolated mountain communities.
Probably it’s the sort of thing where once we know who needs what and where then conditions have improved enough that normal emergency responders can get through.
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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