I recall that I once said Hurricane Katrina would be the benchmark for future disaster responses until something bigger came along. Is this episode in the southeast that event? I dunno. But while it’s not the same song as Katrina, it certainly rhymes in places.
One thing I’m noticing is that the level of animosity, distrust, and downright antagonism for the federal response is orders of magnitude higher than it was in Katrina. Check out this headline: Armed Militia ‘Hunting FEMA’ Causes Hurricane Responders to Evacuate—Report.
I’m putting this down as a ‘friend of mine heard the story from a guy who had a friend who told him….’ To paraphrase a famous quote, ““the first casualty of disaster is the truth”. Armed militias hunting down FEMA? Thats the sort of thing you see in a self-published ‘post apocalyptic fiction’ series on Amazon. In real life? Mmmm….maybe? I’m skeptical.
But there is no disputing that there is a lot more political anger going on in this crisis than in Katrina. I was going to say ‘If you need a reason to be prepared, avoiding having to deal with .gov types and FEMA is a good one’ but that’s not really true. Your reason to be prepared is wanting to be able to take care of and protect yourself and the people you care about. That’s it. You don’t need another reason. That’s the One True Reason.
Mark Twain said that “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.” Katrina was a learning opportunity…some took it to heart, some did not. The .gov, it appears, on a federal and local level, has some cat-carrying going on at the moment.
I’m thousands of miles away from this particular tragedy. Many of you are, too. I’m paying attention, filtering the noise from the signal, and observing what works, what doesn’t, and incorporating those lessons into my own activities. Maybe I’ll never see a hurricane in Montana, but infrastructure failure, floods, blackouts, fuel issues, looting, water shortages, traffic chaos, etc, are not unique to hurricanes…they can happen anywhere. So..it pays to learn from other peoples experiences. I’ve no desire to carry a cat by the tail when I can learn the same lesson from someone else who already got clawed.
The lessons of Katrina were learned, and then that generation retired and the new generation decided that they know better.
I’ve been on incident command teams (including the incident commander) for a few pretty large incidents – two classified as level-1, as big as they get, incidents of national significance. My involvement with FEMA slowed to a stop about 4 years ago. Partly because of the pandemic, partly because of some health issues on my own, but these days? I don’t plan on getting involved again, with these clowns in charge, or the people they trained moving up.
The last FEMA class I took was on continuity management – and the very highly experienced instructor, a full time FEMA employee older than I, was so full of DEI hopium and bullshit that I couldn’t stand it. Listening to this 70 year old go on about the greatness of a FEMA regional director who’s qualification seemed to be gender and race was frankly disgusting – and that’s before FEMA decided their goal 1 was DEI.
Thanks, guys, it’s been great. Don’t forget a towel, and GTFO of here.
The Busybodies have always plagued the ranks of volunteers. It can only be worse when you pay them.
For some reason these people are attracted to being an ‘insider’ when it comes to things such as; serving Thanksgiving meals to the homeless, volunteering at food shelves, Red Cross events, even some EMTs (but generally not volunteer fire depts because it’s too much exertion for them). All these worthy things are diminished when the Busybody shows up to ‘help’.
Well run charities know how to weed these people out. FEMA, not so much.