I suspect a large part of this "very bad" scenario is simple logistics. Currently everything is coming into a very small airport or "over the beach". That is a significant limitation when managing supplies for a large group of people.

Using some grossly rounded numbers here is a quick and dirty analysis of the logistics challenge.

The news said they are up to about 115 landings per day. To simplify assume 150 landings, all C-17s - that is about 9,750 tons of cargo per day. If all of that was MRE's (really optimistic, my guess is the plane would be volume limited, not weight) you would have about 10,400 pallets of MREs or 3 meals per day (all pork and beans) for nearly 12 million people. Of course you would have no water, no medical gear, no generators, no transportation/fuel and no people.

Throw all of that other stuff on the airplanes and the amount of food drops very quickly, especially since you need to fly in all the fuel for the generators, the trucks and planes (though they may be carrying enough to fly out without refueling, which also impacts cargo capacity). With all the above I would be shocked if they were able to fly in more than 10-20% of the raw number above. If we assume a mix of aircraft the number goes even lower since most commercial airplanes are seriously volume limited compared to the C-17.

Similar quick and dirty look at using helicopters. A single SH-60 Navy Seahawk can carry about 1000lbs which would be just about 1,800 servings of MRE pork and beans. If you are carrying water, you are only going to deliver about 100 gallons per trip. Both of these assume that weight not volume is the limiting factor which is probably a poor assumption.

Airplanes and helicopters are quick but bulk cargo needs a port. One of the military folks on the news yesterday pointed out that it takes over 150 airplanes to carry what a single freighter handles. That is why the loss of the port facilities is so critical.

- Eric