I'm not advocating unprepared assistance.
I'm just asking... What were the Proirities set for our organized US government efforts?
It certainly seems to me that hopeful sites where large numbers of US citizens were known to reside should have been investigated first.
I cannot imagine the triage of this scale and not sure that rescuers could pass up a Haitians in one collapsed building in order to go to the Hotel Montana to get the white people.
And from what I have read, there were Americans extracted alive from the Montana and they were not rescued by Americans. Would you have preferred the non-American rescuers at the Montana to have passed over the US citizens and instead looked for other nationalities?