Aid should move faster.

Lots of talk about aid agencies going in to assess, Seems like water, food, tents should have been on the ground much more quickly after the first few hours.
This has just been to slow.

Perhaps a world organization should prepare for a faster relief effort. This type of thing could be planned for and strategies in place before hand.

happened was staggering and not prepared for all the need.

The US has moved a marine expeditionary force to help.
A carrier ship is on its way to the region to provide air support. Unfortunately, big ships move slow.

We have airlifted food, medicine, supplies, 3000 tons of rice, and other aid to the region.

Other countries have provided aid in the form of supplies.

Drug firms have shipped millions of dollars of medicines to the region, the problems are not getting them to Asia, it is getting it to the people and areas needed and distributing them.

More relief efforts are on the way. But again the biggest problem is identifying the areas and getting the supplies to them.

Is this enough, no but it will take time to get them to them.

I guess it is from the airport to the folks that is the biggest problem. One news program a few days ago spoke of one town in southern Sri Lanka needed water....but not rice....another with plenty of rice but no water.

Shock. Very hard to overcome.

One could imagine a force in place on all continents.....many helicopters. stores of water, food, etc. ready to move. for whatever reason. Probably not so hard to do or so expensive. May take a centeralized knowledge/organization center.

War stuff should be stopped. That is a waste.

I can image wave and quake warnings being put into place in many regions of the world now not just in the Pacific rim.

This has been an extraordinary and horrific event.

I am asking for a lot. Thanks for your response.

not like the World Bank or WTO.

I'm really not sure how it could be faster without being so disorganized as to create more problems. You can send every C-130 we have but where would you land them? Who would unload them?

Yes, aid can always be faster but we're talking about parts of the world that are day-long plane rides from the US and Europe to begin with. I'm really having a problem just getting my mind to accept a disaster this huge.

The Banda Aceh region of Indonesia...the epicenter of the quake & the tsunami is one of the most inaccessible in the world and tied up behind a war of insurrection (funded in part by this regime). Whatever infrastructure was devestated and this area, remote as it already was, became even more remote. Personally, I'm surprised the media and NGOs got into that area as quickly as they did.

We're seeing a lot of aid pouring into Sri Lanka, India, Thailand & Indonesia and we're still 4 days out of this catastrophe...the scope we still haven't yet to comprehend. Sumatra is one of the most populous islands in the world and contains hundreds of different tribes/cultures...making communications that lead to relief even more difficult.

I've been monitoring a website that handles amateur radio traffic...almost always the first forms of communications when a major disaster hits (hurricanes), but there's precious little coming from that part of the world. It's a sad and slow process as there are no major landing strips and helicopters are limited in the mountains and jungles.

I applaud the many agencies that have hopped into action and the empahsis now on water, food and sanitation to stave off additional suffering. The local NPR station also mentioned this Tsunami spared some of the most disaster prone lands...the lowlands of Bangladesh, which suffer regularly by typhoons and flooding from the Ganges. Also, that we haven't heard from Myarmar...a closed society that had suffered from the wave, yet little is being heard from.

remote. you are right. Very hard. Probably not many harder place.. Lots of tourist go to some of these regions.
Netwarks set up there tonight on news in Banda Aceh so they get in when they have time.
It is mindblowing.
Enormously sad.
Living in NYC through the 911 shock It is similar in feeling emotionally but this is much greater all though farther away. Much greater in magnitude.