The January 20th posting Scientists: Shower Haitians With Food From the Sky details the efforts of Bill Wattenburg, Richard Muller of U.C. Berkeley, and Richard Garwin of IBM to convince Washington to implement the method.

According to an Associated Press news story, two weeks after the quake, some of the Haiti food aid is still locked in warehouses or being stolen by thugs. This is not surprising, and is to be expected in a disaster like this—especially one where all the prisons collapsed.

This is a crying shame, because the U.S. Military has a way to distribute the food fairly, so that everyone can get at least some food, without the machete-wielding thugs grabbing it in bulk.

Fluttering food is the process of dropping foil-wrapped packets of food directly from the rear of cargo aircraft, so that the food is distributed widely such that gangs, thugs, and the military can’t monopolize access to the supplies.

This 4-minute YouTube video shows it being used in Afghanistan during 2001, with a C-17 dropping tens of thousands of food packets: http://bit.ly/TRIADSvideo

Read the full article about MREs From Heaven for the full details. And click on the bumper sticker below to buy one for your car, school locker, or whatever:

Drop Food—Not Coupons

Spread the word about Dr. Bill Wattenburg's "MREs From Heaven" method of feeding refugees and disaster victims. It's part of the official U.S. Army/Air Force humanitarian feeding operations manual, but they need some encouragement to use to feed the Haitians.

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Gates Lied—Haitians Died BumperSticker

This message is designed to convince U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to understand that airdropping individual MRE packets with the military's TRIADS air-drop system can feed Haiti survivors immediately, without the strongest collecting it all.

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The U.S. Army and Air Force have available to them a well-proven emergency food air-drop system that will allow us to quickly deliver emergency food rations directly to the starving Haitians without the need for secondary ground transport from the recently established air-drop zones. It was used widely during 1993-1994 in Bosnia, and again during 2001 in Afghanistan.

It is called TRIADS, for Tri-wall Aerial Delivery System, can be used with both C-130 and C-17 cargo planes, and is documented in U.S. Army Field Manual 4-20.147/Air Force TO 13C7-37-31, “AIRDROP OF SUPPLIES AND EQUIPMENT: Humanitarian Airdrop”, last updated in January of 2005. Chapter 2 of this manual details the complete rigging details.

The method is simple–simply drop foil-wrapped packets of food, such as granola bars, candy bars, and MREs (military Meals Ready to Eat) from the cargo ramp of a plane. Terminal resistance assures that these lightweight food packets will not harm anyone on the ground, and that they will remain sealed and edible, even if dropped from thousands of feet.

You can watch a 4-minute YouTube video showing an actual 2001 TRIADS mission in Afghanistan at http://bit.ly/TRIADSvideo

You can download the official Field Manual at http://bit.ly/TRIADSmanual

TRIADS relies on the geometry of the foil pouches the MREs are contained in to flutter them to the ground, directly over the population in need. Because of the wide dispersion, the starving children and adults have as much of a chance to get some food as do the thugs running around with machetes, and it becomes impossible for those thugs to take-over and hoard entire pallets of food.

This system was used in Bosnia and Afghanistan, and can distribute over 32,000 MREs per C-17 drop (816 MREs in each of the 40 TRIAD boxes it can carry). Because a TRIAD package can be assembled, rigged, and loaded far more quickly than the parachute-based air-drops we have seen used this week, and because there is no additional ground transport required, TRIADS can deliver far more food to far more people in less time than any other method that can be deployed in Haiti over the next week.

It also is much less costly than the parachute-based air-drops, which means far more food can be delivered for each donated dollar.

Please forward this message to anyone you know who might be able to get a high-ranking disaster relief official, military official, or politician to start using this system ASAP!

For those interested in more details of this “food fluttering”, here is some additional background:

• Dr. Bill Wattenburg’s pitch for dropping food from planes:
  http://www.kgoradio.com/Article.asp?id=1662660&nId=0&spid=33179
• YouTube video of Afghanistan airdrops of individual meal packets:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCxwprZekpM
• Dropping food from airplanes — without parachutes?–class notes of U.C. Berkeley professor Richard Muller (author of Physics for Future Presidents)
  http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/Physics10/old%20physics%2010/chapters%20(old)/7-DroppingFood.html
• High-Tech Cardboard Boxes Used In Afghan Food Airdrops–Describes the Tri-Wall Aerial Delivery System used in Bosnia and Afghanistan to deliver tens of thousands of MREs
  http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=44648
• U.S. Air Force Airdop News Page ((from the Internet Archive, because the military deleted this site)–has a ton of news items about the 2001 TRIAD air-drops that delivered 2 million packets of food in Afghanistan.
  http://web.archive.org/web/20060222040836/www.usafe.af.mil/airdrop/news.htm

Articles on this topic that you should read include “Interoperability Of Public Safety Communication Systems” (Popular Communications, November 2002), Fixing A Communications Breakdown, and Lessons Learned After September 11th.

• Lipton Rice & Sauce
• Uncle Ben’s Rice
• Knorr Skillet Potatoes
• Idahoan Potatoes
• marshmallows
• chocolate chips
• bagged nuts
• potato chips
• tuna
• bagged dried fruit (rasins, prunes, apricots, cranberries)
• bread (including small packages of Boboli)
• beef jerky