I hope everyone is paying attention to what is happening in Haiti. Note the problems, and decide how you would react.

Yeah, I know, Haiti is poor and we're rich. But think back to Katrina, and remember just how quickly that can change.

Onward and upward,
airforce

Better have a better plan than wait for some other country to come save your ass.

Or even waiting for your own.

Imagine you are an eight-man militia squad coming into a town, village, or subdivision with 300 survivors, many of them injured. What would you do?

From the looks of things, water seems to be in pretty short supply--and if you don't have water, you have nothing. A healthy person needs about two gallons of water a day for drinking, cooking, and basic hygiene. The sick and injured, and those who are working, will need more.

Since I'm a member of your squad, I have with me two British Berkefeld water filters. That's good for about fifty or sixty gallons of water a day (provided the water has first been pre-filtered to remove the chunky stuff). You figure you need about a thousand gallons a day.

What would you do?

Onward and upward,
airforce

Whatever my mission was if it was just patrol & report I'd do exactly that.

Honestly if I was ordered to assist first thing is "draft" the able bodied into a partial work force: under the don't work don't eat principle.

Get them to help set up a triage (first) & savage teams second. Savage teams would help slap togather makeshift water stills (sea water can be distilled) & temperary shelters. Not allot you can do but slow down the dehydration effects & sun stroke. Injured would be treated critical first, serious second & those beyond help or with minor injuries would have to tough it out.

Otherwise set up a staging area for a supply drop & radio in the situation.

There really isn't much you can except help them help themselves & maybe pull security against the local gangs.

Unless my mission was to

If I was in charge, and addressing only the water issues, I'd first establish security for the squad, locate whoever was in charge in the town, have whatever resources (the filters) we had that were useful put into play, do a quick survey to confirm the reports, report to higher that more resources were needed, and offer some advice to the locals on how to build expedient filters (sand, charcoal, etc) and boil water. If water is not potable there are lots of ways besides a store-bought filter to fix it.

Why is local water not drinkable? Is it simply a broken part? Generator out of fuel? Something that can easily be fixed?

Or is the water contaminated so badly that it simply can't be cleaned up? If so, then the only option is for the town to evacuate. Life sucks.

Disaster operations are probably the weakest link in the militia system for two reasons (1) capital equipment needed to be effective (2) the need to work with other organizations, civil and military who will also be in the AO at some point.

(1) requires setting up local security, and a squad can just have enough people to protect itself in a total chaos, much less set up a secure water and food operation or manage organizing a "tent city". It really takes a unit with some logistical capability to operate effectively, and especially for any length of time while the community proceeds to take stock and rebuild.

(2) means being the de facto government until the civil authority is present, and then depending on circumstances, that civil authority may be difficult to work with. If part of a coordinated effort with other military based organizations,we would need to be able to interface with their logistics and command structure. (Don't count on ammo resupply for your AK).

There are several phases to a disaster - planning, response, recovery, mitigation. During the response phase (initial response to the disaster) one of the biggest needs is for organized manpower - in Haiti, for example, to just move rubble and rescue people (In massive earthquakes, 98% of the victims who were trapped and survived, were rescued by other survivors, within the first 12 hours post disaster). In floods, the need is for people to fill sandbags, to evacuate threatened people, etc.

Thats the kind of stuff militias can do well. Unfortunately, until the first excellent response, there probably aren't many jurisdictions that will include them in the planning phase (it's tough enough to get volunteer groups of any sort taken seriously).

The recovery phase lasts for months (or years in the case of Katrina) and just the time frame works against volunteer groups. Mitigation is trying to fix the problem so it doesn't happen again (like fixing the dikes in NoLa).

But, during that response phase, there is a lot of good will that can be generated by doing some good work. Don't discount it. And since Militias are the local people, they may know where to find that part to restore the water pump, or fuel for the generator, or whatever while an 'urgent' request from yet another town or village through channels to FEMA or the State just gets lost in the shuffle.

My wife's brother is a Canadian Army staff officer...and he's on the ground in Haiti, right now.

I just heard him being interviewed on the news...he described how some of the Haitians in the neighborhood he was surveying had formed a group - they called it the 'assistance committee' or something and was trying to take care of their neighbors, and neighborhood. At that moment they were collecting a list of survivors from the neighborhood. They've also had to chase off some looter types, and have rescued the people they could reach.

Sounds like a Militia to me.

Haiti has an issue with water because they have little drinkable water on the island & have to filter sea water. Which simply means boiling the water & collecting/cooling the steam which isn't as hard as it sounds. Can be macguyvered with two hot water heaters & a guarden hose.

First priority will always be treating the injured & finding survivors in that order. You can go 3 days without water & a week without food so a couple hours thirsty & hungery won't matter.

At best a militia will be an extremely local organization, one small town dealing with its own first.

If you're talking about Haiti, most small towns in the Caribbean collect rainwater for drinking water - each home collects runoff into a cistern, and they use that. The cistern costs some money up front to build but the water is free after that. Even on fairly large and wealthy islands (St. Martin, for example) have limited distribution of piped water.

They buy water (made from seawater via RO) only when the cistern runs dry (probably not even then in Haiti). Only the core part of PAP have actual running water, and IIRC the sewage goes into cesspools that are pumped out, and then hauled to a waste treatment (kind of) facility. Small towns just have septic tanks.

Sounds like one to me, too.

Good responses. this is not the rainy season in Haiti, but I would have at least a few able-bodied folks work on some way to collect rainwater.

Then, fuel becomes the important thing. True, you can make water safe by treating it with bleach or iodine, but you probably only have limited supplies of these (if youhave any at all), and they are probably best used for caring for the sick and injured.

That means heating water, either to boil it (probably your only real option at this point), or distilling it. I would probably work on digging a fire pit and covering it with some sort of metal grate, and collecting firewood.

Then comes setting up facilities for field hygiene. Survival is definitely labor-intensive.

Onward and upward,
airforce

Watch this video - Los Angeles County Urban SAR Task Force 1 personnel and Haitians chanting USA!USA! when they pull a survivor out.

I think I recognize some of the medics and docs (the guys in the blue helmets), people I've helped train. Almost as good as being there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m7OXtze6CA

And France is already blaming the US for invading Haiti (and the french can go fuck a donut, for all I care about their opinion), I wonder what they will say about Israel?

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3836254,00.html

The only surgical team there - experience in austere medicine really pays off. They also aren't scared by a little security threat, like the Belgians and UN. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/01/16/haiti.abandoned.patients/index.html

While I think Sanjay Gupta is pretty much a tool on CNN, when the chips are down he does a damned good job as a physician - he should get a Nobel Peace Prize (except he actually deserves it).


More good work by Gupta: One patient, a 12-year-old Haitian girl, even managed to receive brain surgery aboard, carried out by American neurosurgeon and CNN medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, who was in Port-au-Prince to report on the humanitarian catastrophe.

The girl was injured in last week's 7.0 earthquake, and was diagnosed as having a 1.2-centimeter chunk of concrete embedded in her skull.

"The surgery went well," Gupta said afterward.
http://www.vancouversun.com/health/Haiti+floating+hospital+provides+succour/2458810/story.html

My experience with humanitarian work dates back to Chad in the late 70's. In my case, it was a life-changing experience. At one refugee camp, between airdrops, I helped dig mass graves--and we couldn't keep up with the demand.

I was already a libertarian, but Chad made me a survivalist as well.

Onward and upward,
airforce

Mine dates back to Jonestown....but I grew up a survivalist (on SAC bases).

Well, I reckon I saw more survivors where I was than you did.

I can still remember seeing photos of the bloated bodies in Jonestown (in Time magazine, I think). I suppose seeing Dachau in March of 1945 would have been worse, but probably not by much. What an awful, evil place.

Onward and upward,
airforce

Yep.

Since Haiti is without a government right now, I think the US should send them an Obama, a Biden, a Reid, a Pelozi, a Boxer, two Clintons and a Finestein.

I'd send them a Constitution, but since the above will be gone, we'll be using it again.

Best idea I have heard all day

Haven't the Haitians suffered enough already?

I get a laugh out of all the pundits saying haiti is in "anarchy," and that government systems have "broken down." Being the resident free market anarchist here, I would point out that Haiti's problems stem from too much government interference, not too little. That's pretty much our problem, too.

Onward and upward,
airforce