Susan,
just ran across this page. The Military doesn't start moving after 3 days - the Guard moves when called - ditto Red Cross, Salvation Army, Southern Baptists (big supplies of Canteens), ARES, etc

Thing is - they roughly figure it'll take about 72 hrs to have their resources in place once they get the call. I've taken the ARC courses on shelter ops and disaster ops, and have been in a few planning session (I'm the local Emergency Coordinator for ARES). They will NOT be FULLY up do speed at 72 hrs, but they will be a good way along. For instance - we do emergency radio comms - The Florida huricanes and the like show that we are really most useful in the first 48-72 hrs. After that, the phone companies will have enough teams out there that critical comms will be back on line - ditto CRITICAL power - The Cell phone companies will bring in "COWS" (poratable cell sites) etc

Basically figure that for the first 72 hrs, you are basically "on your own" and anyone that is supplying you with "stuff" is relying on the "stuff" that is in the disaster area - including HUMAN resources, which are always in short supply - they have THEIR families to worry about FIRST (all the Vol groups stress this - take care of YOUR family FIRST, then give us your time)

In the first 24 hrs, you'll then start to see semi local help, etc. It's just that things take TIME. I'll give a good example of a "non disaster disaster" The Blackout of 2 summers ago. The Red Cross was out fairly fast - by 8pm or so, there were canteens on the street with water/snacks at some of the major transport hubs. Why not all? Because the local trucks and vols were 100% committed. Why were they not out at 4:30pm when a LOT of people could have used them crossing the bridges on foot? Because it takes time to get people TO the canteens, get them loaded, and get them to where they need to go. The truck I was assigned to do comms with ran out of everything but water and cups by about midnight

The NEXT day, when I came back on shift in the early afternoon, we were sitting pretty - we had trucks from as far as Rochester, we had bottled water out our ears - we had packages of Gatoraide to make mix, etc (and of course no clients - power had been on for 12 hrs)

The first 4-5 hrs will mostly be spent figuring "what happened, and where are we needed MOST" and "what resources do we have RIGHT NOW, and what's coming". They know that they have XXX available ASAP, but that's no where near enough for a major problem - they need to activate stuff out of storage etc