Amphibians...Boston Duck Tours.

[Norske3]

Where are they?...does'nt the Army have a fleet of them?.........I'm sure they aren't all in Iraq's desert :D

Boston has a fleet of them.....send up to Boston C5A...load up a dozen or what ever the max is and fly into NO airport...all in a few hours.

AND AT LEAST GET A MEAL AND WATER TO TO THOSE BABIES AND KIDS IN THE DOME!

[ 09-02-2005, 09:27 AM: Message edited by: Norske3 ]

[Gary E]

Agree... I was thinking about them a long time ago.. wondering if the ARMY still has them..

[Bruce Hooke]

From what I've been hearing it sounds like the big issue is the NUMBER of people at the dome and convention center and other places from New Orleans to Florida rather than the ability to get to them. When you are trying to move and feed 100's of thousands of people you are starting to look at truly staggering volumes of water and staggering numbers of buses and other vehicles.

On bit of good news I heard is that the New Orleans airport is apparently back up and running around the clock, which will make it a lot easier to get supplies and people in and out.

[Gary E]

Last night over 11,000 people arrived in Houston and are sheltered in the Astrodome... they ran out of space, so they opened another big building...

Then I hear that Kelly City, which is the old Kelly Air Force Base, has opened a buiding to house aprox 25,000 people. More are going to Dallas.

[Bob Cleek]

The "duck" hasn't been in the Army's inventory for a long, long while. The ones that are still operative are left over from WWII and Korea, I believe. They do have similar amphibious craft, though. Good point. Maybe some of those ship sized hovercraft!

[Norske3]

And what about the landing boats?..the kind that hit the beaches of France.......don't they have a modern version :confused: for invasions today?

And stories of Choppers arriving here and there with..............FOOD?...NO!....ICE!!!!

7/11?...BUSH WAS THERE IN A BANG!.....FLORIDA HURRICANE?...BUSH WAS THERE WITH HIS BROTHER IN A BANG!.......NEW ORLEANS HURRICANE?....BUSH ARRIVES 4 DAYS LATER FAR FROM THE CITY!

[ 09-02-2005, 07:09 PM: Message edited by: Norske3 ]

[Dave Fleming]

The Vietnam era replacement for the DUKW was the LARK.
It was huge, Aluminum hull with 8 Foot diameter tires.

So big that they had to be carried thwart ship on the frieghters that took them from the Oakland Army Terminal to Vietnam.

Last I saw of a number of them were on the shoreside at Camp Pendleton, CA.

That was in the middle 1980's.

Today the military uses some form of hovercraft to move troops ashore or armoured amphibian tracked vehicles.

Navy maintains a unit of the Hovercraft at Camp Pendleton Marine Base.

[Norske3]

And none in nearby Texas or anywhere along the Gulf coast I suppose.

[Todd Bradshaw]

I've been wondering about using ducks since Tuesday. We still have a bunch of them running tourists around the Wisconsin Dells. Something like that would be quite handy for going out to get some of the folks who are stranded and surrounded by floodwaters. If the government had a fleet of them they could be transported on flatbed trucks or by air to anywhere in the country in a matter of hours. Granted, they probably only hold 20 people, but I think they would have been found to be quite useful in situations like this. Imagine what they could have done with this fleet down there.
http://www.wisconsinducktours.com/images/P_Ducks_Fleet.jpg

http://www.wisconsinducktours.com/images/P_Sandbar.jpg

[ahp]

The Boston Duck Tours are using ex-US Government amphibians. I believe they are privately owned now.

[Steve Lansdowne]

Austin has a few of these boats/vehicles that are used to show tourists the town. We also have several thousand Katrina refugees arriving this weekend to be housed in various shelters around the city. Morning headlines were that the Texas governor has suggested that over 200,000 refugees, which is about where we now stand, is about all Texas can reasonably handle for the next several months. Other states much further away are reportedly being asked to consider taking those that are still in need of a place to stay.

[Paul Pless]

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/aaav-atr1.jpg

Isn't this what the military uses now? Isn't this also the same vehicle that the large number of Ohio guardsman were killed in recenetly by a roadside bomb?