How is it, that it is so difficult to plan for what should be the simplest, most immediate response, in a disaster? Communication.
Everyone is furious at the slow pace of the material disaster relief. It’s impossible for me to judge, or, I think, anyone who is not there, to effectively, objectively, judge how intense the effort is to get the basics, food, water, shelter, to those who need it the most, and exactly where the blame lies when those efforts fail. At least, not yet. The Superdome is an emergency refuge of last resort, refuge from a disaster not unanticipated, for tens of thousands of people. And there are no serious stockpiles of food, water, and blankets? Fuel for the generators? Ok, that’s bad enough, some would say criminal and indicative of all that’s gone wrong, but before all that – how come there is no communication tree?
I suspect that the capability is usually there, to communicate with the people, but the culpability is that somehow there’s this government/management/hierarchy idea that if they don’t have good news to tell, don’t say anything.
Everyone I know who has ever been in a situation where normal procedures have obviously broken down, even something as mundane as your airplane sitting on the runway for an abnormally long time before taking off, knows that worse than the delay is not knowing… What the fuck is going on?
I don’t mean to equate sitting on a runway in an aluminum tube with what has happened in NO, not the physical or mental effect, not by a very long shot, but we really hate to be kept in the dark. It may seem like a huge over-simplification to attach this much importance to… information in the face of brute physical destruction, but…
And I don’t have any scientific evidence to back this up, or even a sleazy CNN poll, but it seems to me that almost everyone would rather have bad news (if accurate) than no news at all. There is no trickle down of reliable information in NO. Preserve us from false news, however cheery and well intentioned. Or malevolent, ill intentioned rumor mongering. So why isn’t reliable information the government’s first priority?
The insult to injury is that, not only has there been no serious long-term efforts to make NO safer, short-term preparations are missing, too. It appears to be perfectly reasonable to blame The Patriot Act for siphoning federal funds away from “real” issues, reality like that which has just struck NO. Instead the PA funded high tech anti-immigration instruments lying, rusting in the desert along our southern border.
In NO there appears to be no one in charge, no one to talk to the people, whether it is from a loudspeaker hanging from a helicopter or the FM radio at the cop’s hip. People can take it; they just want to know what the fuck is going on?
Why is it so difficult to have a reasonable plan ?
