Domestic disaster management. Wishful thinking of the highest sort
May 8th, 2008, 12:57 pm · 1 Comment · posted by jhogg
Bits of nonsense about how ill-prepared the U.S. is for a (we should say another) large scale terrorist attack or any similar major event. The Wa-Po had a zinger of a piece about the deficiencies of U.S. hospitals for handling medical emergencies.
Two Bush administration Cabinet members yesterday acknowledged gaps in the capability of U.S. hospitals to deal with a mass-casualty terrorist attack or other disaster, but they said a congressional effort to block pending Medicaid cuts will not fix the problem.
Testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said lawmakers could target funds at the shortcomings more directly, such as by financing the stockpiling of hospital beds, ventilator units or medicines, if needed.
There’s some sort of disconnect when it comes to this sort of stuff. You can’t plan for emergencies. That’s why they’re freaking emergencies. You can train and drill and plan and plot but it’s a pretty safe bet that real world events aren’t going to conform to the stupid training manuals.
This is precisely the sort of event where LESS management is infinitely preferable to more. The last thing we need is some half-wit on the Potomac second guessing local hospitals on preparedness. In the case of a mass-casualty situation: New York hospitals would need shelters to keep people out of the cold, Florida hospitals would probably need anti-Malarial and Typhoid medications, Arizona hospitals need reliable water supplies - there’s no preparedness blanket to throw over the nation. The competence of local emergency personnel is going to set the tone and tempo for these sorts of events. If they’re on the ball things can and will be handled (reference New York) - if they’re incompetent prepare for things to get ugly (reference New Orleans.)
As one of those horrendous individualists your mother warned you about - the Ballgunner intends on being self-sufficient and prepared for such events, and short of medical emergency threatening life or limb, will be holed up in his Ballgunner Fortress of Laughing at Everyone Else who didn’t think about it. If you would like to build a similar fortress, there is knowledge aplenty.
The Bacon Report’s Top 100 Items to Disappear in a National Emergency list is a good place to start.
And as food for thought, self-preparations of this sort are often greeted with rolled eyes and snarky comments, but survivalblog.com really had some good perspective on this:
One of the “highly ritualised affectations” that I have is the desire to put food in my stomach at least once per day. This is a deep seated desire. I also have a corresponding deep seated fear of missing too many meals. Clearly, I must be suffering from “anxiety” and have irrational delusions.
After Hurricane Katrina, I went over to Moss Point, Mississippi to see about helping out my aunt. It was plenty bad, no power, no running water, no stores open, especially including banks and gas stations. But what we did have was a direct phone link to our extended family, and because of that within days we had all the material that we needed. There were five local families living in her cul-de-sac, and all five banded together; some cooked, others watched the kids, everyone worked. Within a month, the cul-de-sac was better than ever, and the main problem was how much trash they would haul away at any one time.
The next block over was not hit so hard, and the families over there banded together as well; every day they all would pack up and leave their houses and stand in the government give away lines. They too had relatives come from out of town to help; they helped to stand in lines so the government would give them more free stuff. After a month of this, they had blue roofs and mildew problems.
There is a learning curve to surviving hurricanes, and the federal government has made sure that the learning curves are all about getting freebies from the government, instead of the learning curve being all about being able to take care of oneself and family.
The citizens of the USA are trained to look for handouts from the government when disaster strikes. There was some ungodly amount of fraud during Katrina in Mississippi, and that was supposed to be the area where the federal government did a decent job. Very few of those people were ever charged; those relatives on the next block over from Chicago, Memphis and Nashville all got their government debit cards and then went home. We on the next block were outraged; but turning them in was not an option, not only did we not have any time, nor know who to make complaints to; the majority of us were from someplace else and would have to leave, meaning that we would make people angry at our Aunt and then leave, letting her face them herself.
It was something that should have sent off warning claxtons to the disaster management people, but they are so busy denying reality that they won’t even admit that there was a problem, much less making up plans to fixing the mess that they have made. And since
millions of Americans now know that when disaster strikes, there is a
network to get freebies whether you need them or not, the next disaster is going to have even more fraud. They have been trained.