View 489 October 22 - 28, 2007 (original) (raw)
This week:
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Saturday, October 27, 2007
We approach All Hallow's Eve by climbing slowly out of Hell. Which is to say that we are slowly doing the final version of Inferno II. Some added material, and in some cases focus sharpening: where the editorial suggestions would change the nature of the book, it's important that we focus in on what we intended the book to be. If our editor didn't get it, then neither will many readers.
So that work continues.
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Department of Hopeless Security, FEMA branch.
We've all seen the preposterous "Press Conference" in which FEMA employees -- bureaucrats, cubicle workers -- stood in for reporters to ask questions. The excuse was that there wasn't time to get a proper press conference organized, and this was a way to get the information out without simply having a bunch of press releases. One can see how that might make sense -- to public information bureaucrats in FEMA. "Mister Secretary, are you pleased with the performance of your people?"
Oh, Yeah.
One more reason why FEMA ought to be abolished entirely. Its political charity work -- bailing out people who did not have insurance -- can be taken over by whatever the Department of Welfare is called now, or parceled out between Urban Development and Interior. The actual emergency preparedness and response activity should devolve onto a reanimated Civil Defense structure. Actually, Civil Defense should be headed by an Army Undersecretary, although a DOD Undersecretary would do. The point is that Civil Defense is mostly preparation and coordination, with the major efforts being local, county, state. The central organization can have some central resources to parcel out at need, but local government ought not count on Washington to put out its fires and clean up after hurricanes. That's not the point of the Federal Government.
Civil Defense takes time to set up, and there's always a danger of bureaucratization: one reason why Civil Defense needs to be largely in the hands of volunteers, not "professionals". As an example, the problem of allocation of Marine helicopters to be used in fire fighting.
There are plenty of helicopters at Camp Pendleton, and there were fires around (later in) the Camp Pendleton area. Do you simply tell a Marine chopper pilot "Hello, there's a fire, go put it out?" Do you include fire outputting in the normal training of a military chopper pilot? The result of putting aircraft with good pilots not trained in this kind of work into a fire zone doesn't have to be imagined. There's plenty of experience: air collisions, fire retardant dropped in the wrong places, confusion over where to reload the helicopter, air traffic control in confined areas, etc. It may be that lack of a helicopter over a certain area results in the loss of a million dollar home; but the remedy is not to send in untrained pilots in hopes that the home can be saved without mishap. The remedy is to put a firefighter manager into the helicopter with the pilot.
Now who is the manager? Should the State have a bunch of them, trained, on standby ready to go in there when there are fires, and otherwise doing nothing? That can be expensive, and fast. Who are these people? Who pays their salaries while they are on duty? Who pays them when there are no fires? What do they do in the eleven months of the year when California isn't burning?
This is in part pure speculation. I don't know a lot about fire fighting, but I do know enough to ask those questions; apparently these questions haven't suggested themselves to John and Ken and our local radio and newspaper reporters, who are howling about the State regulation that requires trained spotters to be in firefighting helicopters not piloted by regular firefighters. The spotters -- managers, actually -- should, they say, have been instantly available, sitting in helicopters waiting for any possible break in the high winds that grounded most of the aerial firefighting resources during the first two days of the fires. Which is fine, if there were lots of trained managers with nothing else to do.
A proper Civil Defense organization looks into such matters, sets up reserve corps of volunteers who get paid for time spent in training and are called into service at need: not just firefighting managers, but logistics people, medical administrators, traffic managers and air traffic controllers. A proper Civil Defense organization looks into the local community resources and organizes them for use when Comes The Day. Most communities have a lot of resources that can be employed in emergencies, but the time to learn what to do is not just after the earthquake or while the fires are raging.
It's not so much that FEMA is incompetent as that competence is not possible. You simply cannot have a central organization that "manages" local emergencies. You can provide resources and encouragement for local citizen groups to set up and train Civil Defense teams. Huge assets like aircraft carriers with nuclear electric power generators, hospital ships, high speed logistic ships may be "managed" centrally -- indeed have to be, since no community can afford such things -- but the response time is going to be slow. It has to be.
In New Orleans, a proper Civil Defense organization would have had someone whose job it was to manage the transportation resources -- including all those school busses that sat unused until they were inundated by the floods. It would have a Civil Defense unit whose job it is to provide communications. (In California my son Alex is part of a California Emergency Services organization that does just that.) It would have -- but that's the point, isn't it? Planning for the local emergency, assessing the community resources, and setting up an emergency management structure is precisely the point, and it needs to be done community at a time.
Set up proper Civil Defense and there won't be a need for phony press conferences to tell the world how good you are.
We used to have real Civil Defense until Jimmy Carter in his infinite wisdom decided we didn't need it any longer. After all, it was DEFENSE and that provoked the Soviet Union. If the US prepares for disasters including war, then it must be planning to have wars. So Jimmy got his Peace Prize. And we got FEMA.