maybe the awful truth is that we all have to hope for barney fife as our local government -- and figure ways to enlist him in what is truly needed. barney was easily swayed, as i recall.
holy cow. i never would have thought that the primitive sitcoms of my youth could have provided actual guidance in an emergency. except for gilligan's island, of course. (professor; 3,000 trunks of clothing and food; radio powered by converted bicycle; etc. we should all have those handy in an emergency.)
rob -- a remarkable conversation. he certainly sounds overwhelmed, and you are so right -- he has such a narrow view of who "his people" are.
i'm kind of astonished at how he seems to focus on how people didn't die "on the bridge." that suggests none of it is his problem, so long as they didn't make it over the bridge [or die on the bridge].
on the other hand, he had the sense at the beginning to comandeer busses and start an evacuation. that is something -- more than most communities or the feds can claim.
this is totally hindsight from far away, but i wonder about two things:
[1] since he had the guts and the power to get some evacuation busses running -- how come he couldn't get other communities to do the same? to take evacuees farther from harm and to communities that were not so immediately affected?
i admit ignorance of the geography and the politics, but gretna is apparently on a major road out of NO, and presumably there are other towns up the road. even if phones were out, couldn't he have sent messengers by car to other places to get help? [maybe the "pony express" method of communication is something we need to keep in mind for future emergencies...]
[2] no matter how stressed they were about floods of desperate people on busses, it is flat wrong to deny access to people finding their way out of a disaster zone on their own. just wrong.
and of course there is the big question, the one gretna couldn't possibly handle if it tried: [3]where the hell was the cavalry? the security, food, water, transportation, medical care? FEMA, homeland security, the national guard, the red cross -- all the departments and organizations that could have helped....
here in california, they tell us to be prepared to be on our own for 3 days if "the big one" hits, because emergency crews will be busy tending to those more needy. what would we do if everything was gone for weeks? what would we do if we couldn't even hike out of harm's way, should it come to that, because people with guns would not let us pass?
that is the horrible part of the story -- not that gretna couldn't absorb all the evacuees, but that they wouldn't allow and try to ease the passage.
my head is exploding. how can a person or a town deny a route to safety to people so horribly harmed? how could this happen?
if gretna didn't think it could absorb the people wanting to escape, why couldn't it have served as a link in the chain of relief?
remember those stories we heard as kids, about bucket brigades? about the underground railroad? about people doing their part to get people to safety?
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| 2005 | 4 |
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