View 621 May 3 - 9, 2010 (original) (raw)
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
In a few minutes we leave to take Sable to the surgeon where we think they'll do her knee operation today. I don't seem to be very good at getting much else done just now. I think I'm slowing down.
We'll have something of substance here later today, but there's no time this morning.
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1145: Well, Sable gets her surgery today, and we don't get to pick her up until tomorrow, assuming all goes well. She is getting her left hind knee rebuilt to fix a torn ligament. Recovery is going to be difficult because we have to keep her from running and jumping for weeks, and she's not going to like that. This isn't going to be much fun, and that's assuming all goes well. It's also more expensive than I would have imagined, but that's not the primary concern.
We're back home and waiting.
I suppose I ought to remind you that this ispledge drive week at Chaos Manor. Just a reminder.
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Oil Spills and Civil Defense
The oil spill crisis continues. Apparently not much was done in the early times when containing it would have been easier. Hardly surprising. Counting on Washington and FEMA to respond to everything, earthquakes, oil spills, hurricanes, floods, tornados, flu outbreaks, wildfires, riots, and any other disasters is not a reasonable policy: it's just too much for any single agency. What's needed is local Civil Defense, and nearly anyone who thinks about it knows that. Preparation for earthquake is different from preparation from tornado which is different from preparation for flooding. Preparation for oil spill is different depending on where the oil well is.
I remember when Herman Kahn used to say that his Hudson Institute had the top three experts on how to end a nuclear exchange. He couldn't tell you which one was the best: "We had three junior fellows spend a month thinking about the problem. As far as I know that's more than anyone else has ever spent on the problem."
My point being that if there are locals, even volunteers, in Fresno or Bakersfield whose job is to think about disaster preparation, they will know a lot more about the next disaster in their local area than a FEMA official in the District of Columbia.
I've mentioned before that back when I was at Pepperdine and Reagan was Governor I did a briefing on a number of topics. One topic was energy. I was concerned back then with a coming energy crisis, and one of my proposals was renewed offshore oil drilling. California needed the energy and the income that an oil separation tax (state tax on oil pumped; Alaska does that) would allow a lot lower California income and sales tax levels. Part of my proposal was that some of the separation tax should be allocated to building and maintaining a disaster containment force. Not being an expert on oil spill containments I wasn't too specific about what that ought to be, but my example was a fleet of ocean going tugs, at least one tanker, and lots of containment booms kept in multiple places. It would not be cheap, but it would be ready, and time is important; and "cheap" is a relative term. It's a lot cheaper to apply something you have than to improvise after the disaster. It's easier to contain an oil slick than to clean up after it gets ashore.
What the "ocean disaster teams" should be doing other than training when there was (we hope) no emergency could be worked out: there was plenty of need for oceanography research, development of wildlife rescue techniques, and the like. There would be something for them to do, but their primary duty would be, like firemen, to be ready. The point was that some kind of spill is inevitable: wrecked tanker, leaking platform, oil well blowout, typhoon wrecking a platform -- something like that will eventually happen. The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill demonstrated what I had in mind (I think my briefing was in 1967).
Today the looming energy crisis I have been writing about since the 1960's is still here. The need for more energy resources is still real. The need for separation taxes -- as they have in Alaska -- is still here. The probability of a disastrous event: shipwreck, platform blowout, typhoon or earthquake at one of the ocean platforms, sabotage, terrorist act, stupid operational error by a drilling team, etc., has not gone down by much and the terrorist act threat may have increased. The potential for disaster is still there and the need for a ready response team financed by separation taxes is still real.
Of course Civil Defense needs to be prepared for a lot more than an oil spill. Fortunately that doesn't cost as much as creating and keeping a fleet of oil spill containment equipment. Earthquake, for example, requires a local organization to educate, prepare, and assist local residents on what they need to do (much as Fire Prevention Week used to be a big deal although it doesn't seem to be so much so now). Same with hurricane and tornado, flooding, and other such potential disasters. Los Angeles need not spend a lot of resources preparing for twisters, just as Oklahoma doesn't have to prepare for tsunamis. The point is to be prepared for what is likely to happen to you, and FEMA isn't a useful way of doing that. Much of Civil Defense can be accomplished by volunteers, retired military and civil service workers, and so forth. We know that used to work: it needs to be tried again.
Centralizing in FEMA was silly. We had Civil Defense. Liberal Democrats didn't like Civil Defense. Civil Defense was attacked by liberals. One reason was that the Soviet Union, which had a very large and very compulsory Civil Defense organization throughout the USSR, pretended to believe that US Civil Defense was primarily a preparation for American aggressive war against communism, and made a big point of saying so often. CDO communications and rescue training, and the general volunteer CDO disaster preparation activities were ignored: the propaganda was that CDO was a Cold War organization. The USSR strategy seems to have worked. To this day it is hard to find accounts of CDO's efforts in local disaster preparation, rescue, and recovery, although many of us remember those times. When I was an Assistant Scoutmaster most Boy Scout troops had an Emergency Preparedness plan and cooperated with local civil defense until Carter abolished all that and created FEMA. CDO survived into the 1980's. I recall that when COMDEX was in Atlanta, in the early eighties there was a large Civil Defense headquarters in downtown Atlanta. The building, which resembled an antebellum home, later became a private club.
There was an attempt to revive Civil Defense as an organization during the Reagan era, but the opposition from those who claimed that it was largely a needless and "provocative" Cold War activity was too great.
So: once again, let me emphasize that local disasters need local preparation, and FEMA can never do all that from Washington. It's not Washington's job to put out local fires in the Los Angeles forests. We can appreciate federal help, but it would be stupid to rely on it. Relying on the Feds to dig you out after a twister is not smart. Had there been a New Orleans Civil Defense organization, you may be sure that there would have been an official -- probably a volunteer Major or Colonel -- whose job was to see that the local school bus fleet was ready to assist in evacuations, rather than sit in a parking lot until inundated. I can give other examples, but that one seems sufficient.
We need to revive Civil Defense. It should organize local volunteers: people to keep the Internet working; to keep communications open; to organize evacuations of homes for the disabled and elderly; to know that Shirley down the street lives alone (with the assistance of a paid care giver who doesn't live there) and will need to be taken care of if there's a power failure or general failure of transportation; and so forth. It's not simple, but it can be done, mostly with volunteers with a little professional assistance.
The time to do preparation is before there's a disaster. Thus was it ever until Jimmy Carter's people decided that could better be done from the District of Columbia. Note that DC isn't particularly well organized either -- the Congress doesn't even trust the Metropolitan Police and has its own elite police force. Such is liberal democracy.
We need to revive Civil Defense
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On Arctic Ice and open water, see MAIL. The Arctic has been open many times in both historical and memorable times. One wonders about the modern concern.There's a lot on this in mail.
My conclusion remains: we don't know enough about climate change or climate in general to justify enormous cost "solutions" to problems we don't understand. We probably are not spending enough on climate research, but we are probably spending too much on the consensus view: we need to fund some "denier" studies by careful people. I'd recommend a committee chaired by Freeman Dyson to allocate a few hundred million dollars in research grants. If Freeman doesn't want to do it, I am sure we can put together a committee of people committed to science, not to prejudged policies. NSF can supply the oversight mechanism, but I would not want them to direct the allocations of funds. They are too subject to political pressures now.
This isn't rocket science. It's far more complex than that. And harder. But we are up to it, once we shed the prejudices and look at data and evidence.
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The Vet just called. Sable is fine, operation went well, her knee is restored, and we can bring her home tomorrow some time. Deo Gratia. Recovery is going to take weeks, and keeping an active dog like that inactive for that long is not going to be easy, but she should have full use of her leg by mid summer.
Maybe I can get to work now. I am astonished at how draining all this is. She is of course the empty nest dog...
