Short post tonight, but I did want to introduce a colleague of mine from our sister DMAT CA-6 out of Northern California, Sam Bradley, responder extraordinaire. She's recently published a book about disaster responders, detailing their experiences at disasters such as Ground Zero and Hurricane Katrina. Well worth checking out.

"To the Rescue - Stories of Healthcare Workers at the Scene of Disaster" at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, etc. There's also a summary at

http://books.simonandschuster.com/To-the-Rescue/Nancy-Harless/9781427799722

http://www.totherescuestories.com/

thesambradley@blogspot.com.

Hopefully the military issues with security will be satisfied soon so that aid teams can get in there and do their job! I'm too tired to go on my tirade about the lack of interagency collaboration, agencies culture clashes, civ/mil culture class, administrative turf wars, etc. Great warriors trying to manage a humanitarian mission without a whole lot of life experience or training in that field. There has to be more civ/mil research in to lessons learned or at least really put the lessons learned from past missions into effect instead of starting from square one each time. The Israeli's had it down. Set up and operational in 48 hours. Mmmmm....