Following Up
Somebody asked me why I titled that last post Katrina
Ballerina. I dunno, it's a Woody Shaw song. One of the radio stations
I listen to played it and it stuck in my head.
I was surprised just how fragile the Telecommunications grid
proved to be. I mentioned this last time, then I read another
Washington Post article on this
Telecom Damage Tops $400 Million.
Wireless ain't always that wireless. I had the mistaken impression that
cell phone networks were entirely propagated by microwave -- from a
central area location to individual cells in a multiplex trunk feed
then out to individuals. Apparently though land lines are routinely
used to get the data to a cell's signal tower. If the land lines
are damaged that cell gets no feed. Possibly failed communication
played a sizable role in the confusion of those first days.
Burning the players in effigy. Why would FEMA attempt to block
photographs of bodies, bodies that were allowed to sit out in the open
for days on end or try to block journalist working inside the city.
This is a indefensible recourse to censorship by political hacks
masquerading as bureaucrats to maintain a favorable spin on a disaster.
However, my sister Susan was in favor of this, because she does not
want her two young sons (my nephews) to encounter these photographs in
the daily newspaper, a defensible position. A newspaper editor on last
Friday's Diane Rehm show answered that question by saying that in
normal circumstance he never would, in a paper he ran, but for a period
that first week it seemed like the various levels of government were
close to failing to get abreast of the events. The situation became
extraordinary and it was necessary to overcome attempts by people to
manage coverage of what they did not truly comprehend. In the end
censorship is bound to fail, it can only make FEMA look like fools (
Director of FEMA Stripped of Role as Relief Leader - New York Times) caught in a regenerative partisan loop.
Another key point focusing on local government is the evacuation.
At work, Tuesday 30 August, before the full scale of the disaster was
apparent, my friend Robert and I hit up the Tulane Univ. website to see
if their library was in danger (we work in a University Library).
Tulanes main server was down they had only some web log like posts on a back up [see sidebar: messages from the president]. One of them from the university's president read in part:
August 27, 2005 - 10 a.m.
Message regarding university closure...Everyone should begin implementing their personal hurricane plan now.
That pretty much says it all.
I don't think any one ever tried to evacuate a major city before
The Steady Buildup to a City's Chaos ..
I see in many articles that this is part of disaster planning
scenarios as the primary way they are going to deal with radiation
dirty bombs, chemical or biological warfare attacks or even certain
pandemics. I hope they will now include in such plans some way of
dealing with the 5 to 10 percent of the population which has never paid
an attention to authority or laws at any point in their lives. As well
as those, like myself, who do not have their own personal automobile.
Or should I understand that if I have not bought that far into the
American dream that I am simply expendable?
The Sunday papers seem to have covered this pretty thoroughly.
So I just see a couple of distinctions to make in all this. One deals
with questions about the size of the storm vs event space. Event
space is just my own term for the risk analysis notion of the
statistical likelihood of a storm of a given size to come to a given
area in a given period of time. Katrina was in fact an extraordinarily
powerful storm (see NWS definition of their Saffir-Simpson wind rating scales).
However as one looks at the steadily increasing costs of hurricanes,
are we seeing bigger storms or brittler coasts?
Another facet to distinguish is Political vs Governmental.
The administrations current predicament revolves around their failure
to hit the right note in political damage control and resulting falling
polling numbers
washingtonpost.com Bush Losing Support From His Base.
Part of this is not correctly reading the essential nature of 11 Sep
01 against Labor Day '05, given the Indian Ocean tsunami in between. It
didn't have a fiends face - nor was it elsewhere.
Politics also involves management, putting competent people in critical
positions -- before disaster strikes, and after. One of the first
thoughts that came to me when the negative impact of the FEMA/DHS
bureaucratic reorganization
The Aristobureaucrats
became apparent, was the recent national intelligence reorganization.
My four years as an Intelligence Specialist rating in the Navy, and
subsequent years as a political science major give me only a small
narrow view into that world. Still the doubts I have about that
certainly increased in this last week. So should yours
The political, irrespective of their left/right stylings, stand
in a permanent position before the public; that their prejudices and
nostrums on the correct size of government, effective management, etc.
add up to competency and service to the general welfare. Politics is
not media advertising where demographics with currency mean everything,
and demographics without currency, mean nothing. This distinction is
preserved whether that currency is money or massed political
(opinion) Everyone matters because your mandate is everyone
Katrina Pushes Issues of Race and Poverty at Bush , not simply who you choose to lead. ---
Addendum: fate of a political liability Embattled FEMA Director Michael Brown Resigns, see also Josh Marshall's TPM
11:41:03 PM  ;;
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