Katrina
I got a message from DarkWyrm today, and after replying to his email figured I should probably post something about this. I lived in Mississippi until the beginning of the month.
Yes, I have some friends who still live there, and they’re all in one piece. The area I lived in, Jackson saw category 1 (70mph constant) winds, and loads of rain, but came through in pretty good shape. Most of the cities power (and water, since there were no pumps) was out until Thursday in a lot of places, and some still may not have power until next week. The police, fire, hospitals all weathered it very well so the command and control (using a military term) was never knocked out. They didn’t have anything like what was (is) going on in New Orleans.
I’ve managed to talk to a few of them on cell phones — but the towers down there are so swamped (with call volume and literally) that getting through is a challenge.
Apparently, my apartment with all my worldly possessions is still intact, and the management office reported just a few trees down and no power until yesterday.
I said when I got this job and moved that there were too many ‘significant coincidences’ surrounding the circumstances to ignore, God kept me out of this one.
As for the situation in New Orleans…. I have a very long, very drawn out rant on how freaking retarded, corrupt, and out of touch our government is. Our elections are a farce. Every four years we’re supposed to overthrow the government, install new people with new ideas and new expirence in place, and instead we keep voting on this idiot career politicians who’ve never lived with the people they’re supposed to represent, never had a REAL job, and spend their time chatting up debutantes. You’ve got a cat 4 hurricane that’s going to smash one of the most economically depressed regions of the country, people who are too poor or too unhealthy to leave, you’ve got levies not designed to take the kind of assult they’re going to get. Flooding aside, the cities control structure was obliterated, people were going to loot. DUH. I lived not far from there, in a town that isn’t too unsimilar (just a lot smaller). DUH. I can’t repeat it enough. DUH. You stupid freakin idiot suits. DUH!!
Why the military wasn’t on alert and already called up two days before the storm, stationed in and around the city, or in areas where they would have been a few hours drive away I will NEVER understand. I was saying this BEFORE the storm came ashore, and I’ve been saying it ever since. A wipeout of civilzation structure in a depressed area like that, and you didn’t forsee riots, looting, etc.? DUH. I’m surprised the mobs didn’t turn into riots. I think the flooding prevented that, and the situation would have probably gotten worse for fire / looting / violence if the flooding -hadn’t- happened.
Either way, this was a sure-fire bet that New Orleans would fall to utter chaos. Shame on the idiots we elect for thinking otherwise.
September 3rd, 2005 at 1:30 pm
While the federal government is being blamed for all the tales of wo, perhaps the biggest thing they are guilty of is making promises to save people in conditions that they have no control over, and giving people too much faith in the power of th government to take away their own personal responsibilities towards themselves in the matter of disaster preparedness and self-preservation.
To be perfectly fair, all levels of government from the highest to the lowst level should be blamed for things ending up as bad as they have, and that includes down to the individual private citizen. Frankly, there’s absolutely nothing any governmental unit can do to protect the lives of 100% of the people, or even to make 100% of them comfortable during such an event. Reality is just too unpredictable for even the best government plans to get things correct. Thus, the first line of defense in terms of preparing for such emergencies is the individual citizen, and at least a minimal amount of preparedness to get them through the roughest times. This includes at least 3 days worth of water and food being readily accessed and moved, something that everyone can readily enough do, at least for the water. It doesn’t matter how poor someone is: they can recycle plastic milk jugs or juice jugs to fill them with tap water, which is perfectly drinkable, as long as it is gotten out of the tap *before* the water system is compromised. It’s true, you can’t promise in such a situation that the building you’re in will survive such conditions: that’s why you need to at least have 3 days worth of basic requirements (food, water, any reasonable medical needs, which vary on the person: a diabetic person or an asthmatic one would absolutely need to do their best to carry their stuff with them on their person) to tide yourself over until the worst of the situation is over with, and either you can escape the area, or more substantial resources become available where you’re at. There is no guarantee in any kind of disaster that you will be in an area immediately helped, due possibly to other areas needing help more desperately, or perhaps the people who were intending to help being wiped out or incapacitated themselves, perhaps due to impassable road conditions and other infrastructure issues, or (as New Orleans has shown) by the behavior of a few citizens, or any number of things.
The governor and mayor blaming the federal government and saying it’s all their fault for how bad things have gone is of limited validity. By saying, “It’s all the federal government’s fault!” is to say that everything that has happened and will happen is purely decided by the federal government, which is simply not the case. The federal government tends to have the resources and capacity to bring to bear things like heavy equipment to clear roads quickly (a few tanks with bulldozer attachments would be able to fairly quickly make roads minimally passable for other things) and provide trained troops to establish order in the midst of chaos, and to bring such things as Army Corps of Engineers to bear on such things as levees, etc. though it seems things weren’t setup nearly as quickly as you’d think they should/could be, for whatever reason. Ok, granted. Of course, when the local police forces decide to throw in the towel and join the masses in making a mess of the situation, then it’s clearly not only the federal government’s problem, because the local governments have the responsibilities and rights to do as they will do towards providing infrastructure.
The local governments, from what I’m aware of, ordered mandatory evacuation orders for New Orleans and (I expect) other areas on the coast that were hit. They setup (though without much planning) shelters for people to go to, such as the SuperDome, and they had that in place before the storm hit, as they figured it was going to get rather nasty. Everyone should have known (including the general public) that the levees weren’t designed to survive what was promised, and that massive to complete flooding in the area was almost 100% certainly going to happen. Even if they had a place to pump the excess water from the storm that wouldn’t end right back on top of them, those pumps required electricity they didn’t have a guarantee of providing, due to things like the higher-than-expected winds taking out the grid, which is easy to anticipate happening, and the probability that refueling emergency generators might be harder than expected. But one thing that’s been clear to anyone that’s paid any attention to floods and other natural disasters: water systems are often not back up and running safely for a rather long period of time during such things as floods, because all the nasty stuff that normally goes into sewage and is on the ground otherwise ends up in the water supply. Hence, the responsibility of every individual citizen to do their best to provide for their own immediate survival needs *before* such a disaster makes it impossible for them to get fresh water comes into the mix.
Now, as much as the individual citizens should have done that, they weren’t *forced* to do that: freedom has a price, and a lot of people have paid the price of freedom: the freedom to not plan for emergencies, to not take reasonable precautions, and the freedom to act for themselves instead of blindly relying on the government to take care of their welfare in all things. New Orleans shouldn’t have promoted “Use the Convention Center, SuperDome, etc. as safe havens” without either requiring that people bring their own survival supplies, or being absolutely sure they had as much taken care of before the storm hit as they could do. Think about it this way: if you allow a gallon of water per day per person, and if you were a pessimist for how many people would be there how many days, you could at least get some rather large tanker trucks or pools or something in there (enclosed containers would be wisest, preferably portable) to hold water that was out of the local city water, *before* the storm hit. If things weren’t as bad as expected, no big deal: the water can be returned to the source easily enough, or used to water plants, etc. without a problem. It would be a rather cheap way of providing some minimal survival time to a large group of people that, for one reason or another, didn’t get out.
Now, how many people didn’t get out of New Orleans because they were completely unable to get out and to some form of shelter outside of there? Again, this is something that the more localized governments should have worked out for themselves, perhaps coordinated via the state government. The excuse “But we don’t have cars!” combined with the (reportedly) great mass transit system belies the capacity of being able to get everyone out that wishes to get out (again, personal freedom/responsibility) at least to areas that aren’t below sea level, into very short-term use shelters in the area (churches, schools, large government buildings, etc.) to at least something that isn’t as likely to be completely destroyed during the storm. Cars and other modern forms of transportation aren’t needed by the majority of citizens in such a situation: they’re very nice to have as an option, but most people are of sufficient health to be able to walk out of the area of New Orleans without killing themselves, but they still would need a place to stay for at least as long as the hurricane winds/rains were going on. After that’s passed, longer-term solutions for places to stay, or going back, as the conditions make feasible, can be deciphered.
Now, let’s get back to all that mass transit and the lack of cars amongst the poor: that’s where the local government should have taken advantage of that desirable set of logistics presented to them. It isn’t very nice to make some legal decree that people are to follow without making it feasible or possible for them to follow. The pooping pity is that they *had* the means to provide those otherwise without their own transportation to get out of the evacuation area: all those buses. You’d probably be hard pressed to find any area of the US without at least a certain percentage of school buses, regardless of the other mass transit provided. I’m led to believe that New Orleans (at least before the hurricane) actually had a very good mass/public transportation infrastructure. I don’t know how many roads in/out of New Orleans existed before the hurricane, but I’d be surprised if it was *only* I-10, and even if that’s all that existed, it still could have been made to work with what could have been done. Without question, as many people that had running cars should have gotten themselves and anyone they could carry with them out of the evacuation area, as the conditions were likely to destroy them or bury them in place, making them more of a hindrance for afterwards. Being that interstate highways tend to have at least 2 lanes going in either direction (though perhaps there was some construction on a portion of I-10 I’m not aware of: there’s always construction season somewhere on the interstates, at least in the northern climates with freeze/thaw cycles) those buses (school and general mass transit) in combination with other local governments that also have them, could have setup a relay system to haul as many people out as quickly as possible, in a rather orderly manner. A number of designated areas for pickup within the evacuation area could be chosen, and people would get on, for free (to them: the city would initially pick up the tab, but FEMA would have no problem dealing with reimbursing such expenses, I’m sure: it’d be a bargain) and the buses would use two lanes dedicated to mass transit vehicles to go to the next stop along the evacuation trail of relay stations, with one lane going out away from the evacuation area, and the other lane used to return to the evacuation area, where ordinary cars would not be allowed to travel. The ordinary car traffic would use the rest of the lanes to leave the area. When the local buses reached the designated relay stations, the local buses from the next area would then pick up those that just got off, and move them farther into the area that could move them to temporary shelters, and so on. The relays would be a relatively short distance in time and space, allowing for a fairly rapid cycle time for each run, likely less than an hour round trip. This would allow them not only to get as many people as possible that actually *wanted* to get out of most direct harm’s way efficiently, it’d also be more reliable and cheaper to do it *before* the storm hit than after. It would, of course, require that the communities in the area have established shelters (but schools are something you don’t have to ask much permission for in such situations, as school isn’t going to be in session anyway: besides, schools are perfectly suited for dealing with large amounts of buses getting in and out, and any school that meets modern code to meet the rights/requirements of those disabled are better suited than most places for the more challenging situations) but the plan also gives the added benefit that the affected cities would also be able to get their assets (buses) into a more protected area than they would likely be if they were left in their standard places, just to be drowned out by the elements. That, alone, would probably more than pay for all the fuel and labor costs required to transport all the people back and forth.
So, the real tragedy isn’t so much how much of the city was destroyed by the elements (having Lake Ponchartrain, the Mississippi River banks, and the ocean at higher altitudes than most of the city is just suicidal, never mind relying on anything that can fail that’s been made by man) but rather the loss of life that was preventable by a combination of the various levels of government working together, combined with the private citizens taking on responsibility for their own welfare to the best of their means, which didn’t happen, all too often. It isn’t like hurricanes and flooding is a rare thing for them there. By failing to plan, they (not just the government, again) planned to fail. They can blame FEMA all they want, etc. but FEMA has created guides for being as prepared as possible for these sorts of things, including the 72 hours worth of supplies, for a very long time. For that matter, my church has been teaching such things for longer than you’ve been alive, and has an infrastructure (as much as a non-governmental unit can) for dealing with such emergencies and providing for the needs of people involved in such events. The church buildings are quite quickly made available for shelters, and the church welfare system is very responsive in getting needed supplies to the people in such situations, and it isn’t limited only to members. They have storehouses in regional areas within a fairly short distance to most anything, that can respond immediately with volunteers to help. Their ability to get somewhere is, of course, limited by how passable roads are, and the ability of the governments to maintain sufficient order to allow them to get in and out without getting killed, etc., and being allowed to get in and out. Bryan, there’s one there on 84th Street, not too far off of Zionsville Road, that I’ve personally volunteered at, and driven delivery trucks for, as well as filled food orders, among other things (note: for those that can work, you need to do something to get what you need: it isn’t a dole for those that are able to work but choose not to). You should (when you have the spare time) inquire how it all works: I think you’d find it all very fascinating. I can give you more information if you desire.