Paul,
I sincerely apologize. I didn't mean to imply anything negative about
the Red Cross, or its C^3 infrastructure which is clearly up to the task
of its goals. The Red Cross served 500,000 meals last night according
to an OM here, who is active in both the Red Cross and ARES, and it is
clearly doing a good job in this disaster.
I understand that Health and Welfare traffic is not the priority of the
Red Cross right now, but while the Red Cross is working to prevent
further loss of life and livelihood for thousands and millions of
people, individual hams can and are passing health and welfare messages,
and the OM I heard on the SATERN net was wishing that they would
encourage some of the local hams to go to the shelter and start getting
messages out now. This point was on the topic of decentralized and
self-organized use of ham radio.
I have quite a few people contacting me for help, and I have sent them
to the Salvation Army for health and welfare, wish that they had more
resources deployed to get information out of the affected areas and
refugee areas now.
I understand that effort of organizing such activity would be harmful to
the life and safety mission right now, but it seems to me that hams
should be organizing themselves to go to the shelters in their areas
(especially if they are in areas that people have fled to, rather than
from) and offer their services to collect information to pass out to
SATERN and other H&W nets.
Leigh.
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