Desperation Mounts in Caribbean Islands: ‘All the Food Is Gone’

originally posted by: xuenchen

originally posted by: csimon
a reply to: xuenchen

Only that the government is usually responsible for issuing the mandatory evacuation. Mandatory doesn't mean optional.
So why blame the government?

I'm not saying that they are not in a bad way or that they shouldn't get help. Just that sometimes compliance is the way to go.

Was there any mandatory evacuation orders in the islands under non-US government control ?

Probably not. To me the ownership is confusing.

Hopefully help is on the way.

a reply to: Bluntone22

We're sending food and supplies from Aruba to our sister islands of St Maarten, Saba & St Eustatius. The Dutch military has been there since before the storm hit. The situation is horrible and desperate indeed though, as my cousin explained to me yesterday. There is no running water and no electricity, and many buildings and infrastructure have been destroyed. There are a few spots on the Dutch side where there is wifi so that they can communicate with us. They are sendingthe children away to Aruba, Curacao and the Netherlands to live with relatives or foster families, because all schools will be out of commission for a while.

a reply to: Cobaltic1978

"military personnel and police officers" have to eat!

originally posted by: Edumakated

originally posted by: Bluntone22
Hurricane Irma has left several Caribbean island desperately short of food.

“All the food is gone now,” Jacques Charbonnier, a 63-year-old resident of St. Martin, said in an interview on Sunday. “People are fighting in the streets for what is left.”

"Residents of St. Martin, and elsewhere in the region, spoke about a general disintegration of law and order as survivors struggled in the face of severe food and water shortages, and the absence of electricity and phone service."


These islands are under control of foreign governments and those governments are being criticized for their slow responded.
Rightly so I might add.

"As reports of increasing desperation continued to emerge from the region over the weekend, governments in Britain, France and the Netherlands, which oversee territories in the region, stepped up their response. They defended themselves against criticism that their reaction had been too slow, and insufficient."

Mother nature sure does let us know who's really in charge. Hopefully these people will receive aid very swiftly.


mobile.nytimes.com...://www.drudgereport.com/

Shows you how quickly the thin veneer of civil society goes away once disaster strikes.

Even though I live in an area with few to no natural disasters, I am still starting to prep a bit for any scenario where we may wind up with out power, food, gas, or water for an extended period. You just never know.

As Rousseau said "Civilised society is only three meals away from revolution". Those with money and space will plan ahead and always have food in their freezers. My friends who lived out in the country had two freezers, a diesel generator and two oil tanks. Because they frequently lost power due to bad weather, it was a necessity. They also had the advantage of only needing to go food shopping once a month.

Anything can cause a power cut in just about anywhere; a digger going too deep in a city street, sudden snow blizzard taking down power lines, workmen deenergising the wrong power lines, or even your upstairs neighbor having a flood. Then you are sitting in the cold dark while your food in the fridge goes off.

a reply to: Bluntone22

Just a note based upon prior experience, stuff the media won't tell you.

Catholic relief services is already on the ground responding to the crises; they were staged prior to the storm hitting.

abcnews.go.com...

Catholic Relief Services This international humanitarian organization that is affiliated with the U.S. Catholic church and headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, has already begun responding to the devastation in the Caribbean, providing shelter, water, hygiene kits and other supplies to those displaced by Irma. Information on how to donate and where the funds are being allocated is available on its website.

The truth about how these things work is revealed here:
www.slate.com...

ARC was roundly blasted in the U.S. for its shambolic response to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, with international observers warning that elements were so bad that they verged on criminal wrongdoing. Seven years later, despite an internal retooling effort, it failed again in 2012’s Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Isaac. (The response was “worse than the storm,” one Red Cross driver told ProPublica during its jaw-dropping investigation.) Typically, the organization has had more success responding to small-scale disasters; it’s common to hear stories people tell of the blankets and compassion they got from Red Cross volunteers after house fires. But even there, they’ve been getting into trouble: ARC’s 2015 response to a string of northern California wildfires was so bad—showing up unequipped and unprepared, shutting down other volunteer operations, and then failing to provide promised food or shelter on its own—that locals shunned the organization to focus on their own relief efforts.

The Red Cross response in Haiti was simply.......awful. It took them months to actually render any aid. Catholic Relief Services was on the scene, setting up triage, rescue and relief centers within 18 hours after the Haiti 2010 Earthquake.

I was in New Orleans 3 days after the storm hit. Catholic Relief Services already had relief centers set up complete with shelter, beds, water.......the whole bit. The Red Cross didn't get set up and running until weeks later.

As you'll see as well, ARC's response to Harvey in Houston has the Houston government angry!
www.chron.com...

I'm unsure exactly why the ARC is so slow to respond to major disasters.

I do know why Catholic Relief Services responds so quickly..........they're already on the ground in the areas needing relief. In the case of Haiti, they responded with truck loads of supplies and volunteers from their permanent Relief Service Center in the Dominican Republic. They "pre-positioned" for Katrina. More importantly, they deliver faster because they're volunteers are locals organized at the local level meaning they don't have to recruit and train.

a reply to: Bluntone22

Wasp, Kearsarge, and Oak Hill have begun operations in the Caribbean. Their first priority was evacuating the hospital and injured on St Thomas. They're doing assessment work and starting rescue operations now. Once they can start getting C-130s in and out they'll start flying supplies in, and use the ships for fresh water and floating hospitals.

originally posted by: midnightstar
Storm is long goin so get some nets go get fish .
Its a island surrounded by ocean there are lots of fish in the ocean .
Or they can sit and starve . Hoping someone will feed them .

Having food in stores is nice makes life so much easier .
But we are not talking about deslet wast lands here .

These islands fead them self's with fish for 1000s of years before any country did any thing have they forgotten that ?

A major hurricane can disrupt the fishing for weeks.The fish are blown off of the reefs and boats and other fishing gear destroyed. The devastation visible on land is nothing compared to what the reef's look like. Some will be blasted to bedrock.

a reply to: Bluntone22

Any time ive ever been to the Carribean its been All You Can Eat.

You just gotta go down to the restaurant.

a reply to: TonyS

Because the Red Cross is a huge business that collects a lot of money, but only a small pittance of the donated money ever is seen by the needy.

Catholic Charities and Salvation Army do a much better job of actually helping the needy. The Red Cross is just a business organization and an advertisement.

Wrong time for joking.
Sorry, post removed.

originally posted by: astra001uk
So the people in the Caribbean Islands want help from outside governments is this the same people who have gone to the Caribbean to evade paying taxes to the very countries and systems they now demand help from mmmmmmmmmmm it is the height of hypocrisy for me, to demand help, either you pay into a system that can help in times of need or you are a capitalist and believe in market forces

The rich are covered by insurance and flew out days before the storm.
The resident poor who clean the houses for the rich and serve their drinks are stuck with nowhere to go.
Those are the people who are in need of help.

Every country really should have a ground system ready for airdrop supplies; drop locations, personnel, distribution plans, etc. You can always parachute or drop skids on runways. Waiting to have harbors and runways cleared can take days, weeks or even months.

originally posted by: FamCore
a reply to: Bluntone22

A sign of the times. Surely, some other countries can provide donations or support to assist them during this tough time.

Those former colonial powers just have to hang on to those places... They uave enough loot leftover from the old days to sort that out down there.

a reply to: Asktheanimals

Ya here in FL it was like ghost town around tampa bay the days before. Instead of hunker down and storm proof theit stuff they just bounce real quick and let the insurance companies sort out the mess, i guess is the logic. For most of the people places in the state the upheaval is more damaging than the storm. Its mostly just where the eye hits that gets smashed. Then the eye quickly breaks up. How quickly we turn into scattered ants. Atms down gas stations dry and so flows the inconveniences from the affair.

On the bright side tons of work everywhere for all the ants when they unscatter, getting the mound back in order.

originally posted by: IgnoranceIsntBlisss
a reply to: Asktheanimals

Ya here in FL it was like ghost town around tampa bay the days before. Instead of hunker down and storm proof theit stuff they just bounce real quick and let the insurance companies sort out the mess, i guess is the logic. For most of the people places in the state the upheaval is more damaging than the storm. Its mostly just where the eye hits that gets smashed. Then the eye quickly breaks up. How quickly we turn into scattered ants. Atms down gas stations dry and so flows the inconveniences from the affair.

On the bright side tons of work everywhere for all the ants when they unscatter, getting the mound back in order.

I was just discussing this with some younger acquaintances, there's going to be TONS of construction jobs in FLA and TX for the next few years. $$$$ to be made for sure....

The UK response hasn't been that bad. They've had a auxiliary '___' in the Caribbean for the hurricane season. It's RFA Mounts Bay.

en.m.wikipedia.org...(L3008)

Not the worst ship to have on standby, it's got a flight deck and multiple craft to get stores ashore. Plus it already had bits and bobs and board to deal with a situation like this.

HMS Ocean is also enroute, probs a week away now with further helicopters and supplies. Troops and police have been deployed to help prevent looting.

This has been a major event for the overseas territorys and will take long term help to get them going again.

But yh they should be contributing a little bit more in the way of helping out with tax avoidance. Especially if every now and again we have to help them out. It's not gonna be cheap sorting this out.

like lots of Americans, they've been taught it’s easier to let the government feed and clothe you

What a stupid, asshat-ish comment. So nobody on those islands ever worked a day in their lives? What a crock.

Our populations are too large to support off the land, which is a big vulnerability IMO.

originally posted by: Nickn3

originally posted by: midnightstar
Storm is long goin so get some nets go get fish .
Its a island surrounded by ocean there are lots of fish in the ocean .
Or they can sit and starve . Hoping someone will feed them .

Having food in stores is nice makes life so much easier .
But we are not talking about deslet wast lands here .

These islands fead them self's with fish for 1000s of years before any country did any thing have they forgotten that ?

A major hurricane can disrupt the fishing for weeks.The fish are blown off of the reefs and boats and other fishing gear destroyed. The devastation visible on land is nothing compared to what the reef's look like. Some will be blasted to bedrock.

A Cat-5 is strong enough to blow fish off the reefs? Wow!

originally posted by: csimon
a reply to: xuenchen

Only that the government is usually responsible for issuing the mandatory evacuation. Mandatory doesn't mean optional.
So why blame the government?

I'm not saying that they are not in a bad way or that they shouldn't get help. Just that sometimes compliance is the way to go.

When we are talking about entire islands that each countries in and of themselves, where do they evacuate to? The storm engulfed these places. It's not like the US where the population can displace itself to some other region inside the borders. There was no region outside the influence of this storm.

The only way these people were going to be evacuated was by a concerted mass effort made by the home governments who are, in many cases, in continental Europe.

a reply to: CB328

There is a difference between working and knowing actual survival skills.

I work, but I don't know much about survival.

What am I going to do if the SHTF? Correct the punctuation and grammar of a deer until it dies of boredom?

At least I know the theory, but that's no substitute for the practice when it comes to survival skills.

originally posted by: Bluntone22

Hopefully these people will receive aid very swiftly.