You just smiled and took my hand

SMace

I heard these lyrics in a song and I thought it fit. I propose we spend our time and energy helping the people that need help. Let's point fingers and try to make it better after we get people evacuated.

Is FEMA screwing up? Sure looks like it to me. But get them off the tv taking time to defend themselves and get them where they need to be. EVACUATING people, setting up shelters and getting supplies that will sustain refugees for months.

To all the finger pointers and dividers who aren't doing jack ##### to help anyone, can you wait a little while? Will you take that energy and put it towards helping people?

lhill

You've hit the nail on the head, SMace! Let the finger-pointers get down from their soap boxes and lend a hand!

Linda

Dasher

I am in complete agreement with you on this one. There will be plenty of time to point and talk it over later. People are hurting now. It nothing else, let's spend our energy on sending positive energy to those who are in need now and will be in need for awhile.

HRLASS

I agree. I'm not into the suits with talking points, photo ops and power plays - just get survivors out and food and water in!

Parabeaglex2

I'm really trying to wrap my brain around this, while empathizing with the reality of what is happening in LA and MS. For perspective, I can really only rely on what's gone on in my part of the country, and how response has been handled here.

When Mt. St. Helens blew in 1980, we lost a lot of people to the ash storm and the pyroclastic flow. Darkness due to ash clouds at 12 noon east of the Cascade mountains. The Feds knew that an eruption was imminent, but it was NOT clear whether it would be within a week or a year or a thousand years. FEMA (if it even existed at that time - I'm not sure), proved to be lacking. We were all going about business as normally as we could wearing particle masks, at the suggestion of our local emergency personnel (side note - it was a real pain in the a** to shake out the car's air filter after every trip). That was the solution.

But the fact remains, as another poster has pointed out so accurately, that a significant portion of the American Southeast has been reduced from a vibrant, 21st century city to a third-world environment. The priority should be to GET THOSE PEOPLE OUT AND GET THEM WATER AND FOOD!!!

It's going to take years to get LA and MS back to normal. The focus right now should be on doing whatever we can do to help them get there. The word we're getting in the Northwest is to send money, and I've done what I can for now. Also, there was a news story that I was pretty tickled about - a local company that produces something called the "X-Pack" has sent several thousand of these to the relief effort at the request of the Army. It's a bag filled with sanitizing, filtering material that can take contaminated water and make it into potable water in a matter of minutes. It was originally developed for the Army and the first Gulf War but they didn't see the need because they had desalinization plants. Now, suddenly, they find a need for it. The Army has purchased a whole sh**load of them for the relief effort. Go figure.

To Whatever's comments in an e-mail from our General Manager in Alabama regarding the comparison between 9/11 and this crisis, I would only say that although many 9/11 victims had to start over, they did not have to strike north, on foot or hitchhiking, or east, or west through waist-deep contaminated water with no access to electricty, drinking water, food, etc. Those are the conditions the victims in the Southeast are facing right now.

In the NYC metropolitan area, all they really had to do was go a relative short distance away and there was power, water and shelter available.