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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.
=========
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.
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