Reply #20: Gore arranged (& paid for) several flights of critically ill folks to TN [View All]

[AlGore-08.com]

I posted this earlier, in this same forum. (Gore did this at a time when local officials were on TV screaming and sobbing for people to stop giving press conferences and send help instead.)

http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/9/7/164747/4155

From TMP Cafe
by Greg Simon, President FasterCures

On September 3rd and 4th, FasterCures worked with a small dedicated group of people to airlift approximately 270 medical patients and evacuees from the New Orleans airport to hospitals and shelters in Knoxville and Chattanooga, Tennessee. This is the story of how it happened.

On Thursday, September 1^st, my friend Jill Chozen of San Francisco called to ask if I could put someone in touch with Al Gore. Dr. David Kline, the father in law of Jill’s friend Denise Kline, was stranded in Charity hospital in New Orleans. The situation was dire and becoming worse by the minute – food and water running out, no power, four feet of water surrounding the hospital and alligators eating corpses outside. David is a neurosurgeon and needed to take his patients out of the hospital as soon as possible. David asked Denise to find Al Gore for help because David knew Gore from operating on Gore’s son after a life threatening auto accident nearly 16 years ago.

(snip)

We were now desperate to find a contact on the ground at the New Orleans airport to help triage ambulatory medical patients into these planes. FEMA in Washington was non responsive. We spoke to the aide to one of the deputies at FEMA and was told they did not need or want our help since the hospital evacuation was going fine. We looked at the reports from CNN about the conditions at the field hospital at the airport and discounted that opinion immediately.

(snip)

(On September 4th) Mimi was unmovable. We were not military and that was that. She tried to sound grateful for our intentions but she was not going to have outsiders help. I even offered to GIVE her the planes and the crews and the hospitals and let her run it through her NDMS system but she would have none of it. She asked me at least to delay until noon the next day and I said I would try.

I called Steve and told him to delay the planes. I called Al. It was 2 a.m. in Nashville. He was planning to leave for Dallas at 4 a.m. to meet the plane. I told Tipper what was going on. She said, “Greg, you can’t delay it now. It’s too late, the doctors are flying in here to fly with Al to Dallas.” Al got on the phone and said we could not delay. I tried to scare him. What if something went wrong with a patient on the plane? What if the military did not cooperate on the ground and no patients got on the plane? He refused to budge. Col. LaFon could handle the patients and Al would trust that when they landed they would break through the resistance and succeed.

(snip)

Over the next three hours (from 2a.m. to 5 a.m.) I was called by an array of Majors and Lieutenant Commanders telling me to stop. (“I don’t mean to be rude, sir, but you must not do this. You must stop this now.”) Major Webb from GPMRC (don’t ask), Grant Meade from ESF. Major Lindquist from TRANSCOM (at last!) all telling me they would not cooperate and they did not know how we had gotten permission to land. I never mentioned Gore’s name because no one ever asked me who was paying for the flights or how we had come so far.

Finally at 5 a.m. Major Lindquist said if we landed he would not put any patients on the plane and we should expect no cooperation and there was no place to store the plane so we would have to leave.

(snip)

(On Sunday the 5th, after evacuating 270 people from NOLA) We decided not to return to New Orleans because the medical patients we could take had been helped. (We could not take bedridden patients on stretchers on this plane.) Gore said that on the second trip to New Orleans, the doctors at the airport told him that the evacuation of the first 90 ambulatory patients had been the tipping point in their ability to adequately care for the other bedridden patients. They also noted that the military evacuations did not really pick up steam until after we “motivated” them with our private effort.

Of note:
Throughout the entire operation in Tennessee, EMS operations in Chicago had stayed prepared to handle patients or evacuees. None ever arrived because the military did not want us to use Chicago. The volunteers in Chicago were amazing in their desire to help. Mayor Daly had been rebuffed earlier when he offered a complete mobile hospital unit for the airport and a tent city as well. Sen. Barack Obama called Gore and asked how had Gore managed to land in New Orleans when the Senator had been refused landing rights to help.

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