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.
The Red Cross, on the other hand, selects these people for leadership positions. It’s less a charity than a social club for bitter first wives of bankers, lawyers and their ilk.
Steer clear of the Red Cross. They’ll do a half-assed job on scene, and their first concern is always selling the Red Cross brand, not providing critical services.
I was suckered into volunteering with them by a friend, and it was the most discouraging and tooth-grinding-anger-generating days that I had experienced since retiring from the Army. Picture a very large warehouse, filled with food and water and other supplies. Completely disorganized. Nothing on pallets, despite the forklift sitting in one corner with an uncharged battery — no one knew how to plug it in, let alone operate it — and the pallet jacks gathering dust and cobwebs in another corner.
Huge stacks of cases of bottled water and canned goods, being moved from one pile to another to check each case for an expiration date. Set out some pallets and stack supplies on them by expiration date, so you don’t have to do the “pick everything up and inspect it and move it again” dance every 90 days? Not a chance, that’s “too difficult to keep track of” according to the 50-something ex-first-wife with the liberal arts degree who is in charge of their logistics storage.
Give the soon-to-expire stuff to the multitude of homeless people living in the city park immediately adjacent to the warehouse? No, “that would put us at risk of a liability suit” so everything has to be opened and dumped into a trash dumpster out back.
A couple of weekends dealing with that nonsense and I was done with the RC once and for all. There are far more efficient and effective local groups to work with. Outfits that aren’t going to collect funds during a crisis and send them all to the national headquarters to pay for new office furniture and trips to conventions or lobbying workshops for the senior staff.
The Red Cross is a blood-collecting business that dabbles in emergency services. And has the most ignorant, sanctimonious jerkwads running the place anyone’s ever seen.
Anybody on the MISO grid should realize where that electricity comes from, and how many transformers and trees are between them and the power source. Then look up “Blue Blizzard” and extrapolate that over a populated area.
I just read that ONE guy was arrested for making threats, and the Militia BS was just that, BS. But the comments to that story were unreal! One guy said those folks should just be sprayed with Agent Orange, and that was one of the milder ones. The Maga haters were out in force, no matter that these are our fellow citizens who are suffering terribly. But the media just couldn’t let that unsubstituted rumor headline go to waste.
These days it is vitally important to remember — at all times — that there are a not-insignificant number of people who HATE you and everyone who is in any way like you.
Doesn’t matter why they feel this way. No point in even trying to puzzle out what drives their hate. Just accept that it is real and that they would happily “spray Agent Orange” — or sarin — or bullets — on your family.
These are the people to fear during a crisis. Not the mythical “Golden Horde” that’s going to drown or freeze or starve to death in the local version of the Superdome, too ignorant and lacking in initiative to set foot outside their ‘hood. The Haters are fully convinced of their rectitude and will report you for “hoarding” or “curfew violations” or “breaking quarantine” or any other nonsense they can dream up. And they’ll do it in the smug impenetrable belief that they are the good guys, protecting others from “greedy” “dangerous” “selfish” you.
Pay attention in the here and now. Identify who these folks are. And react appropriately if the day comes that they pose a threat.
This seems like the 50th hurricane I’ve been through – lived in Florida all my life. There’s no excuse to not be prepared for hurricanes if you live here. That’s not to say tragedies can’t happen. But we were up and running again as soon as the winds stopped blowing, even though the power didn’t come back on for 5 days. It’s the stuff in the Carolina’s I don’t see coming. I will say though – it seems strange to live down stream from a dam and not even consider the possibility of something happening to it. Maybe I’m paranoid, but I do think I’d have at least thought about where to go and what to do before it happened.
I lived on a tiny (5 sq mi) island in the Caribbean for a couple of years (teaching at a medical school, scuba diving a LOT).
Rode out three hurricanes. All the houses were built for it (concrete construction, tile roofs), everybody had their own generator and fuel, everyone put their stuff away before it blew away.
Aside from vegetation all over the road (singular, it was called ‘the road’), no problems at all. And after, aside from the water being cloudy, the ocean was absolutely FLAT for a week. No waves, nothing. Like a lake, from the Caribbean to seemingly Africa.
Not to change the subject but RTG has those AK47 mags again. Made in Bosnia/Herzegovina but for the German market.$4.97 each.
https://www.robertrtg.com/store/pc/AK47-30RD-7-62X39-30ER-GERMAN-MARKET-MAGAZINE-AC-UNITY-164p13015.htm
Thanks for the heads up. Ordered 10.
If you think this is a clown show, just wait til the New Madrid Seismic Zone lets go.
Spot on Matt. If the nation has a geologic Achilles heel….its New Madrid.
I’m plugged into USGS for alerts worldwide above a 6 and above a 3 for New Madrid.
Hurricanes come with a warning that earthquakes don’t.
You mean when the entire eastern seaboard breaks off into the Atlantic?
Or when Tenerife blows?
There is a reason FEMA stands for Feeble Excuses Minimal Aid!
If armed “Militias” did try to hunt down FEMA they’d have a hard task…
I suspect this story comes from people who happened to be carrying in an unpleasant situation trying to find someone dispensing aid.
Ceejay
How much of a skeptic am I?
The odds of militia hunting down FEMA…. near zero.
The odds that FEMA admin would make the militia claim to justify shutting down what little effort they are making but don’t want to pay for? Much higher.
Now ask yourself, what caused that opinion to spring forth?
People who build on a sand bar next to the ocean complaining about a storm and begging for money is like someone in Canada complaining about a snowstorm and demanding evacuation. Rule #1 – Don’t be there.
And yet our glorious guberment will buy that property from the fools, and then HUD sells it to the next generation of fools to build again.
militia turned out to be one guy running his trap…but this got me off my duff to put in a hand pump on my well. genny gas won’t last forever.
Bear in mind, this is in a region where everyone fills their deer tag every year, and then goes out a poaches a few more without getting caught, 24/7/365, since ever.
How everyone (particularly the media who printed it) knows the story is unmitigated total BS:
There’s not one single FEMA trophy head mount at the general store, and no FEMA skins drying out on barn walls all over the region.
If those boys had gone hunting FEMA, they’d have limited out on Day One, and you wouldn’t find anyone from FEMA alive in 16 counties, and the lists of the missing federal employees would rival the Twin Towers death tally from 9/11.
QED
Unlooked for silver lining: the farther and longer one keeps the FEMA dweebs from the actual disaster, the better the local outcome, unhindered by federal busybodies, will eventually be.