The Coalition of the Swilling

Simply amazing good fortune and fantastic piloting! Three cheers for everyone involved.

One small point I noticed is that a long time after the people were rescued a coast guard cutter cruised by. Police boats also arrived after the people were safe.

I don't mean this as a knock on the police or the coast guard, they can't be everywhere. But it shows that anyone who insists that Americans must rely on the government for safety, either from crime or poverty, is expecting too much.

But hooray for the heroes that actually dared to land, did it right, and the men who let the women and children off first, and the ferry crews, and everyone else.

It makes you proud to be American, doesn't it?

That pilot is a hero, no two ways about it.

Exactly right, Skyler. Everyone should expect help when they call for some sort of emergency services, but it's completely unrealistic to expect that help immediately. If we don't take care of ourselves, people have a much lower chance of survival in situations like this. What happened on the Hudson is a perfect example of that.

Just don't say that to lefties. You'll get them all upset that government can't do it all.

No doubt they toasted the people who helped, and their guardian angels. That story gets more amazing each time I hear it.

Don't agree, Skyler.

Better that the ferries got in there first, who could haul maximum bodies off with minimal fuss. I'm sure that's what the emergency services were thinking, since they'd only be able to get a couple folks onboard in the time it took a ferry to load scores. The folks who would have been left waiting for the next cutter could have started slipping into the water from hypothermia.

I think they played it exactly right.

I think your statement is exactly what I was trying to say. I'm not sure what you disagree with.

Sis, that's true only if the emergency services asked them to go in. Skyler and I are assuming that they weren't asked, they just went in. I've seen nothing in the news that says otherwise.

Apparently some of the ferries were just amazingly close - and the ferry captains were like, "There are people out there. They could die in that water. We gotta get them."

And they did. God bless the ferry captains.

The fire crews came a bit later but not that much later. But the ferries did the bulk of the rescues, because you can fit a lot more people on a ferry than you can on a fire launch.