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| Gloom on Preparation for Doom |
| 2005-10-21 |
| It's been four years since the Pentagon was attacked by suicidal foreigners armed with box cutters and Virginia driver's licenses. Izzat a dig? The United States is currently engaged in a bitter war in Iraq and government officials warn us to be on the alert for terrorists who like to blow up civilians to make their political points. As Tuesday's closure of two tunnels in the port city of Baltimore reminded us again, a major nuclear, chemical or biological attack on American soil remains a scary possibility. What's even scarier is that we're still not ready. "We are not where we need to be as a nation in the area of preparedness," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff admitted at a congressional hearing on Wednesday. Meanwhile, the governors of all 50 states apparently didn't think it was necessary to figure out how to evacuate their own people if any of these worst nightmares ever came true. Didn't the Frisco Mayor recently whine is wasn't possible to evacuate his city? It took an ordinary event like a hurricane - albeit a deadly hurricane that slammed the Gulf Coast - to wake them up, not the specter of Osama bin Laden's minions. So Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner has now asked George Mason University's Center for Health Policy, Research and Ethics to develop a first-in-the-nation, post-Katrina plan detailing specific steps to be taken for rapid disaster mobilization and setting up emergency shelters for evacuees. While citizens of the commonwealth should be grateful that their popular, rich and handsome governor has taken time from his busy schedule as an unofficial presidential candidate to consider his constituents' basic security needs, one nonetheless has to wonder why it's taken him four years to make this request. Ow! That's gotta hurt! But doen't he know Hilly's got it all sown up? Since the GMU effort will apparently be the first written state evacuation plan in the nation, Warner is well ahead of his even more tardy peers - who have been too busy spending billions and billions of homeland security funds to stop and think about what they're supposed to be doing with them. One wonders what Dick Cheney's home state (Wyoming) did with their 'share' of homeland security cash. Buy gas masks for ponies? Or to put it another way, how can the states not have evacuation plans four years after Sept. 11? Relying primarily on "shelter in place" strategies to assuage citizens' very real fears that nobody from the government will be coming to save them, the governors simply assumed they could call upon the vast resources of the federal government if things got too dicey for them to handle. But as the federal response to Hurricane Katrina made uncomfortably clear, Washington's centralized Federal Emergency Management Agency is much too slow and bureaucratic to rely upon when hours count and thousands of lives hang in the balance. Sure, but a recent article in Scientific American predicted deaths from evacuation would exceed those caused by a 'dirty bomb' in New York City. Do we need a 'Comet Evaucaution Plan', too? FEMA was not only too slow to respond itself, it actually prevented volunteers from helping hurricane victims. In one sickening instance among far too many, a 500-boat flotilla of fishermen, hunters and private boaters that arrived in New Orleans from nearby Lafayette was turned back by FEMA officials - who were then standing around doing nothing to rescue patients from flooded hospitals and nursing homes. Chertoff told the House Government Reform Committee, chaired by Virginia Congressman Tom Davis, R-11th, that FEMA must be retooled to improve its response time to such natural disasters. More testimony will be heard and congressional fingers will point, but there's a high probability nobody in the federal government will ever candidly say: "If we can't respond in a timely manner when there's a few days' warning, there's no way we can possibly react appropriately when there's not." Appropriately is one thing. Fast enough to prevent MSM wailing is a completly different universe. As The New York Times' John Tierney reported, when the chips were down in New Orleans, it was giant retailer Wal-Mart that immediately began handing out chain saws, water, ice, clothes and 100,000 meals to Katrina victims while then-FEMA Director Michael "Brownie" Brown was still trying to find out where they were. Wal-Mart isn't even in the disaster relief business, while emergency preparedness is supposed to be FEMA's main mission. How many times does government have to fail before people finally admit that reshuffling a centralized bureaucracy will not make it more responsive in a crisis? But that would leave responsibility for mass evacuations to the governors who've spent the past four years doing squat. If there's a disaster requiring you to suddenly flee from your home or place of business, you might be better off just heading to Wal-Mart. |
| Posted by:Bobby |
| #1 They don't teach capitalism in schools these days, do they? Walmart is a business. It has a very simple command structure. The boss says do something, which as long as it is not illegal, gets done. He doesn't have to comply with a library full set of regulations and instructions imposed upon him by a board of directors, he doesn't have to coordinate and get the approval of regional managers, his suppliers snap to as soon as he issues orders, he has far more authority to shift monies from one column of accounting to another to cover operations and can do so in a phone call. Now you can do that too in government, but they call the person Caesar, not Mr. Secretary. You want efficiencies? Are you prepared to pay for those efficiencies? Cause its not going to just be in money. |
| Posted by: Anginemp Hupolurong7319 2005-10-21 09:34 |