Word: airlift
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...helicopters are in Iraq”), or Bush’s budget cuts, or some other disagreeable government policy Katrina would not have been an enormous disaster is disingenuous to the point of being an outright lie. The idea that we, as a country, have the resources to immediately airlift 50,000-odd people out of what is tantamount to a war zone, when virtually all civic infrastructure in New Orleans and its suburbs was destroyed or inoperable, suggests a shocking disengagement from reality...
Despite all appearances to the contrary, New Orleans had a plan. A week after the storm, Nagin summarized it for the Wall Street Journal: "Get people to higher ground and have the feds and the state airlift supplies to them--that was the plan, man." But in fact, the plan was more substantial. And it makes clear that the mayor was in charge when disaster struck. Nagin, a former executive with Cox Communications who was elected three years ago on the promise that he would purge the city of corruption, was supposed to prepare New Orleans for a hurricane...
...White House to emergency-management officials at federal, state and local levels, all the way down to the cops who abandoned their posts in New Orleans. "The system broke," says Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards Research Lab at the University of South Carolina. "A system that cannot airlift water and food to a community that's desperate for it is a system that is broken...
...World Food Program (WFP) says 2.5 million people in Niger (pop. 11.7 million) need urgent food aid at least until the next crops can be harvested, in two or three months. But even though the U.S. thought the problem severe enough to airlift tons of high-nutrient food to feed more than 34,000 starving children, experts have yet to upgrade Niger's situation from a food crisis to a famine. The number of people dying there is still small compared with the tolls during the disasters in Ethiopia in 1984-85 and Sudan in the mid-1990s, which claimed...
...than two miles away, at the Caledon River Bridge, which stands between the two countries, South African police and military were conducting security searches that severely restricted the daily flow of vital supplies into Lesotho. The beleaguered country appealed to the U.S. and other Western nations to organize an airlift. "We are a hostage country," said Information Minister Desmond Sixishe. "I wish South Africa would pick on someone its own size...