Interesting article on the Strategic National Stockpile. I wonder if they have one of these somewhere for ammo. (“Yes! And its called ‘my basement’!”)
When Greg Burel tells people he’s in charge of some secret government warehouses, he often gets asked if they’re like the one at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the Ark of the Covenant gets packed away in a crate and hidden forever.
“Well, no, not really,” says Burel, director of a program called the Strategic National Stockpile at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Thousands of lives might someday depend on this stockpile, which holds all kinds of medical supplies that the officials would need in the wake of a terrorist attack with a chemical, biological or nuclear weapon.
The location of these warehouses is secret. How many there are is secret. (Although a former government official recently said at a public meeting that there are six.) And exactly what’s in them is secret.
“If everybody knows exactly what we have, then you know exactly what you can do to us that we can’t fix,” says Burel. “And we just don’t want that to happen.”
What he will reveal is how much the stockpile is worth: “We currently value the inventory at a little over $7 billion.”
Yup, listened to it on the drive to work. Interesting. I mentioned it at work and was told “Oh, yah, I usta take a train through Georgia past a huge fenced compound filled with at least 1,200 black plastic FEMA coffins in the row I could see. One day, everything was gone, just weeds, like it was never there. Other passengers also commented on it.”
If this guy is stupid enough to admit that he works there, it would just take a determined group to conduct surveillance and follow him to work one day. Mystery solved.
“”Many jurisdictions across the U. S. have less staff and less resources available to them to surge up in large-scale events,” says Petersen. “I mean, that’s a risk.”
While they do have plans for emergencies, and lists of volunteers, he says, “they’re volunteers. And they’re not guaranteed to show up in the time of need.”
Over and over, I heard worries about this part of the stockpile system.
“We have drastically decreased the level of state public health resources in the last decade. We’ve lost 50,000 state and local health officials. That’s a huge hit,” says O’Toole, who wishes local officials would get more money for things like emergency drills. “The notion that this is all going to be top down, that the feds are in charge and the feds will deliver, is wrong.”
She’d also like to see more interest from Congress in all of this — because it’s a national security issue. “These will be do-or-die days for America, should they ever come upon us,” O’Toole points out.
And having a stockpile in a warehouse will be just the beginning.”
And the reason the populace inclusive, CD(Civil Defense) program was let slide into oblivion and replaced with FEMA, was what again?
Now take that “$7 billion” claim and break it down using the inflated priced and absurd purchasing policies of FEMA and other government agencies.
My BiL is an officer with a largish east coast police department. Since 9/11 they have been issued 3 different patterns of NBC protective masks — each time being required to turn in all masks, overgarments, gloves, etc, to be issued this year’s new-est and best-est. Old gear was simply destroyed — not even used for training. Seals on filters were broken for “training” on operational-stock masks, but no new sealed filters were ordered, let alone issued. Likewise overgarments. The BiL raised a fuss about having his overgarment replaced after it was unpacked and worn for 16 hours during a training exercise. After months, he was issued a “replacement” overgarment, in a size that might have fit his youngest daughter. His department was paying something upwards of $150 per overgarment, which were nothing more than Tyvek coveralls selling for about $13 at Grainger.
It’s a safe bet that this “Strategic National Stockpile” warehouse contains a quite limited amount of medical supplies, and that much of what is on hand is not going to be compatible with other agencies’ supplies. Much of what is stored will have been purchased based on political considerations: minority set-aside contracts, preference points for woman-owned businesses, no-bid contracts for companies located in well-connected Congressmen’s districts…