| Tuesday, September
6, 2005
Structural FailureSubject: FEMA History
Dear Jerry,
The following link to the FEMA website gives a brief
history of the agency:
http://www.fema.gov/about/history.shtm
President Carter formed the agency in 1979, lumping
together bureaucratic disaster relief funding organizations with the Defense
Department's successor to the old Civil Defense Corps. It is clear that the
bureaucrats won, ignoring the spirit and the practices of the Civil Defense
organization.
Local responsibility and self reliance are
antithetical to centralized Federal control, as we see more and more cases
in the Gulf area where the Feds as well as State agencies stop locals from
clearing debris and recovering bodies. I hope that Hurricane Katrina will
serve as a fulcrum for debate about local versus federal responsibility for
emergency response. We are in our neighborhoods all the time; we cannot wait
for someone from that small fraction of the population with a uniform and a
badge to take care of all of us when minutes count.
Jim Ransom
====== I reckon I owe a small apology to the individual FEMA
officials, most of whom can't really be held at fault, and some of whom I
suppose responded heroically. It wasn't what they did in response to this
mess that I complain of; it is that they ever thought a central bureaucratic
structure would be the right way to respond to emergencies. The problem is structural. The existence of FEMA encourages state and local governments to neglect what is, after all,
not only a task that is primarily in their jurisdiction, but which is THE
primary responsibility of any government. It is precisely to deal with such
situations that governments exist. Local committees might deal with much of
the routine matters of life with government confined to enforcement of
contracts and some judicial functions: for much of its life that was about
all that the government of the Roman Republic did.
It is when there are invasions, acts of banditry by
organized bandits, floods, fires, and earthquakes and volcanoes, that we
need collective strength and a chain of command. The existence of FEMA
implies the Federal Government will "manage" various emergencies. It cannot
and should not. FEMA should be restructured and preferably
renamed to become a coordination office with federal resources to be applied
in assistance to local Civil Defense organizations. In days to come I'll try
to spell out what a Civil Defense organization ought to look like:
volunteers, with training, with identification, with communications, with
military or semi-military ranks and titles; people who know what they are
supposed to do, where they are supposed to go in the event of a crisis
whether that be invasion, fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane;
semi-autonomous even from the local government with its own chain of command
so that much of it is self-actuating. All this is possible
because all this once existed.
And see mail.
=============== Roberta is recovering but burdened by
crutches and a cast which make life difficult.
And it is time for me to take the dog on a lonesome walk.
========================== On the education front:
"A second myth - that America's white elite
children compare favorably with those abroad - is also false. In the most
recent international data, comparing students in the top 5 percent in terms
of achievement, the United States ranks 23rd out of 29. The third and most
common myth - that the nations who do better than us are "homogenous"
societies - is also not true. Immigration has transformed much of Europe, as
it has the United States."
--NYT editorial
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/opinion/06tue3.html
========================== Bob Denver,
RIP.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050906/
ap_en_tv/obit_denver;_ylt=AgTlBq0h_
A0OlR6AaN0uAPlxFb8C;_ylu=
X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl
- Roland Dobbins
For me he was always Maynard G. Krebs from the Many Loves of
Dobey Gillis. That was before Gilligan's Island or The Good Guys. I met him
a couple of times. He used to come to COMDEX in its heyday; one or another
company would hire him to appear in their booth. I forget whose products he
advertised. They had some kind of tropical island theme; Dan thinks Paradise
Products, but I can't remember. It might even have been Orchid. I never much
cared, but I did like talking to him, and he was always delighted that I
remembered him as Maynard and The Monster That Devoured Cleveland rather
than Gilligan. Work?! ============
Apparently it was all Bush's fault. He appointed the wrong people, and he
didn't sign Kyoto, and that caused the hurricane.
I confess I am weary of mail that says in effect that the
head of FEMA is an idiot so therefore it's all his fault. Political
responsibility requires political appointments; this is not a government run
by a Civil Service bureaucracy and thank God. The head of an agency rarely
has much control over what happens in it although he will have to bear the
responsibility if things don't work. That's the way we try to do things in a
republic. It doesn't always work, but it's about the best we know of. The
alternative is government by career bureaucrats and that seldom works well
either. Every large centralized bureaucracy in history has
been inefficient, sometimes notoriously so. We decided to centralize the
education system, with disastrous results. The S0viet system of agriculture
produced about the result you would expect. NASA is another case.
Federalizing Civil Defense and disaster response in a nation this side faced
with the variety of possible emergencies we face produces about the results
you expect. It won't work. It was a structural failure.
Now I suppose we can say, well, you should have known that
there would be disorder, and have sent in troops before the storm hit. How
you were supposed to know that is a problem: why did you expect a breakdown
in law and order in New Orleans but not in other cities? And of course it's
illegal to send in Federal troops absent a request from the governor.
But why we expect Washington to take care of all our
problems is beyond my kenning. It won't work. It never has worked. Self
government implies some self responsibilities and self capabilities.
Or was it George Bush's fault that all those school busses sat unused until
flooded out? Of course it was -- if you have already decided that it's all
the Federal Government's fault. But in fact it isn't any particular person's
fault. The system was doomed from the day it was decided that we would have
central bureaucracies to deal with such emergencies. Trust
us, we're the professionals, is almost always snake oil, and if you drink
the snake oil you should not be astonished to discover that it wasn't even
pure snake oil. There's probably kerosene and strychnine in there too.
As to all the horrors: Gary Younge in Baton
Rouge Tuesday September 6, 2005 The Guardian
There were two babies who had their throats
slit. The seven-year-old girl who was raped and murdered in the Superdome.
And the corpses laid out amid the excrement in the convention centre.
In a week filled with dreadful scenes of
desperation and anger from New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina some
stories stood out.
But as time goes on many remain unsubstantiated
and may yet prove to be apocryphal.
New Orleans police have been unable to confirm
the tale of the raped child, or indeed any of the reports of rapes, in the
Superdome and convention centre.
New Orleans police chief Eddie Compass said
last night: "We don't have any substantiated rapes. We will investigate if
the individuals come forward." And while many claim they happened, no
witnesses, survivors or survivors' relatives have come forward.
Nor has the source for the story of the
murdered babies, or indeed their bodies, been found. And while the floor of
the convention centre toilets were indeed covered in excrement, the Guardian
found no corpses.
During a week when communications were
difficult, rumours have acquired a particular currency. They acquired
through repetition the status of established facts.
One French journalist from the daily newspaper
Libération was given precise information that 1,200 people had drowned at
Marion Abramson school on 5552 Read Boulevard. Nobody at the Federal
Emergency Management Agency or the New Orleans police force has been able to
verify that.
But then Fema could not confirm there were
thousands of people at the convention centre until they were told by the
press for the simple reason that they did not know.
"Katrina's winds have left behind an
information vacuum. And that vacuum has been filled by rumour.
"There is nothing to correct wild reports that
armed gangs have taken over the convention centre," wrote Associated Press
writer, Allen Breed.
"You can report them but you at least have to
say they are unsubstantiated and not pass them off as fact," said one
Baltimore-based journalist.
"But nobody is doing that."
Either way these rumours have had an effect.
Reports of the complete degradation and violent
criminals running rampant in the Superdome suggested a crisis that both
hastened the relief effort and demonised those who were stranded.
By the end of last week the media in Baton
Rouge reported that evacuees from New Orleans were carjacking and that guns
and knives were being seized in local shelters where riots were erupting.
The local mayor responded accordingly.
"We do not want to inherit the looting and all
the other foolishness that went on in New Orleans," Kip Holden was told the
Baton Rouge Advocate.
"We do not want to inherit that breed that
seeks to prey on other people."
The trouble, wrote Howard Witt of the Chicago
Tribune is that "scarcely any of it was true - the police confiscated a
single knife from a refugee in one Baton Rouge shelter".
"There were no riots in Baton Rouge. There were
no armed hordes."
Similarly when the first convoy of national
guardsmen went into New Orleans approached the convention centre they were
ordered to "lock and load".
But when they arrived they were confronted not
by armed mobs but a nurse wearing a T-shirt that read "I love New Orleans".
"She ran down a broken escalator, then held her
hands in the air when she saw the guns," wrote the LA Times.
"We have sick kids up here!" she shouted.
"We have dehydrated kids! One kid with sickle
cell!"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1563532,00.html
I make no doubt there was looting in
New Orleans. We saw it on TV. I make no doubt there were some horrors. But
perhaps not so many as some would have liked to see.
======================================
For more on Phillip's ship and the US Navy in the Katrina rescue/response:
http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?story=91708&ran=132637&tref=o
tell your friends. Tell all your friends.
I now have a long report from Lt.
Cdr. Phillip Pournelle, Executive Officer of the HSV2 SWIFT. At the end
of that is a link to a second report. If you want to know what is happening
in the Gulf of Mexico, go read both those reports. It is in mail.
===============
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