I Downloaded an App. Suddenly, I was a Rescue Dispatcher. (houstonchronicle.com) 172
Holly Hartman, a journalism teacher for 22 years, writes an incredible story: After watching nonstop coverage of the hurricane and the incredible rescues that were taking place, I got in bed at 10:30 on Tuesday night. I had been glued to the TV for days. I read an article about the Cajun Navy and the thousands of selfless volunteers who have shown up to this city en masse. The article explained they were using a walkie-talkie-type app called Zello to communicate with each other, locate victims, get directions, etc. I downloaded the app, found the Cajun Navy channel and started listening. I was completely enthralled. Voice after voice after voice coming though my phone in the dark, some asking for help, some saying they were on their way. Most of the transmissions I was hearing when I first tuned in were from Houston, but within 30 minutes or so, calls started coming in from Port Arthur and Orange. Harvey had moved east from Houston and was pummeling East Texas. Call after call from citizens saying they were trapped in their houses and needed boat rescue. None of the volunteer rescuers had made it to that area from Houston, but as soon as the calls started coming in, they were moving out, driving as fast as they could into the middle of Harvey.
This other app made me an air traffic controller (Score:3)
And that I can only communicate with drones or their pilots.
I Downloaded an App. (Score:5, Funny)
Suddenly, I was a vietnamese callgirl.
Re:I Downloaded an App. (Score:4, Funny)
Suddenly, I was a vietnamese callgirl.
And that makes for a happy ending!
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Let me guess - that app was called "IRC"?
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Not working? (Score:2)
I've been relaying messages for someone in the Miami-Dade area. She has internet connectivity, but not cellular. Her only method of communicating with her mother is via cellular (call or text), and she doesn't have any other text type gateway apps set up. However, she does normally use Zello which is non-functional for her even though she has data. So I'm not sure if Zello is overloaded there, or if it requires more bandwidth than is currently available. Either way I'm posting this to point out that Zell
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Google Voice, it's free and gives you voice, sms, and voicemail access online with free US domestic calls.
This is how I became an instant air traffic contro (Score:1)
This is how I became an instant air traffic controller. I stumbled upon this app, thinking it was a game, when suddenly I saidYou are cleared for takeoff
I followed it up immediately with the clarification This channel is reserved for drones and drone pilots only. Please clear the channel for them. Thank you for your cooperation.
Very mixed feelings on this (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow. This article describes what I tried to do in 1995 for the Kobe earthquake, 20 years ago. But it suggests ways things go wrong as well. In the linked article the journalist put massive effort in and helped some people. But she also told everyone repeatedly that help was coming, even when she knew there were no boats in the water. I do not want to judge, since it sounds like she was doing a superhuman feat that nobody else was there to do and that was the best that was humanly possible. In the end compassion directed her to make some decisions and compassion later haunted her enough to write the article, and explain everything so that others can help in the future.
At that time I was at a new Internet provider that opened for business just before the quake, and I hoped to get Tokyo University to act as a call center to pick up calls for help. There was no news coming out of the area and no phones, but Internet lines were working. We would put it together on a web page and coordinate grassroots disaster relief, sharing people's needs and who could bring help there. In the end we couldn't do it for two main reasons. News organizations refused to cooperate by sharing what they saw from a helicopter, and Tokyo U. said there were too many bureaucratic problems with cooperating. In the end while I was able to provide some support on my own, mostly by relaying information and helping people who were in the area to upload pictures, there was a limit to what was possible. And then the most amazing site was created by a Stanford student if I remember correctly. Nowadays there are lots more systems. I believe the phone company or was it Yahoo made one that lets you say if you are safe.
Since data connections are usually more resilient than voice service (and even voice over data apps degrade) there will likely continue to be a need for data-based systems in emergency situations. I don't know why the emergency support dropped to such a horrifying extent that nobody else could help. I hope the article stimulates more people to recognize the need for better support of communities in disaster areas. If 911 gets overloaded or ignores a key communications channel like this app, then perhaps there should be a way to bring more people on board from different walks of life in an emergency and coordinate online. In fact anyone online even far away from the disaster area could have done so. This journalist took up the challenge but it shouldn't have to happen that way ever again.
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I'm in Houston. I saw what happened.
As for flooding, there are areas of town that often flood. Those living there are prepared and are used to it. But with Harvey, many areas of town flooded that had not flooded before. These were the areas where the rescues and Cajun Navy were most evident and needed. While I'm sure if you look hard enough you can find someone or some obscure report somewhere that predicted this would happen, it was mostly unexpected. Thus the mayor recommended people not to evacuate
Ham Radio (Score:5, Interesting)
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In gods own country, yes.
In Europe not so much.
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Out of curiosity, how much help did HAM's provide during Harvey. I'm generally skeptical of the bold claims made by the HAM's I've known (many look to be a couple bacon cheeseburgers away from needing a rescue themselves), so this sounds a good disaster to measure what percentage of the communications they handled for the Houston area. Where can we get some stats?
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Out of curiosity, how much help did HAM's provide during Harvey.
The Ham groups typically work with the state and local emergency management agencies directly.
After the dust settles: I'm sure there will be the ARES division report summaries showing how much traffic the hams passed and how many man-hours their groups put into it, Although you might need to subscribe to QST or find the corresponding ARES groups and attend their meetings to learn the info; it's not like there will be press releases with
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Good point about the softer side of the network from the Portland 911 system [wweek.com] event. On a larger scale, all it took was one a misplaced if/break statement [calpoly.edu] to prove a "trivial" Unix patch can bring down even the most robust network. ( As a C programmer I have to take issue with the article blaming the compiler and not the programmer and their test tools/environment, but then than's just my world view).
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I happen to live in the mo
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The Ma Bell microwave towers are magnificent structures. Many of them have their electronics mounted underground in a bunker that is mounted on springs -- even in tectonically boring regions.
They're part of the Long Lines project, which was paid for in part by Cold War fears (and funding). They didn't create this robust microwave infrastructure for consumer profit; they created it for government cheese.
The cell phone networks could be upgraded to be similarly robust/redundant, but we don't have any cheese
Ham radio (Score:3)
I stayed at the Holiday Inn last night (Score:2)
I am not a rescue dispatcher but...
strangely entrancing (Score:2)
Try this then: trance music + police band.
You have to play with the volumes of both until you get the right balance, but once you do it's strangely pleasant to listen to. Obviously, cities like Baltimore and Chicago have more chatter than Halifax.
I actually use this as background when I played Eve, it was a perfect level of 'activity' that made it seem so much less of a boring empty universe.
Probably NOT as entertaining if you are, in fact, an emergency services dispatcher.
http://youarelistening.to/chic... [youarelistening.to]
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Right because we don't have problems already because so many of our LEOs are laughably badly trained, just bad at their jobs, etc. Replacing them with any random citizen who downloaded an app is going to go just so very well.
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Honestly speaking, as a guy who is a firearms owner, I shoot better than any cops I have seen at my gun club (I have shot against them and they always lose) and I am probably NOT going to be shooting anyone in the back as they run away, unarmed, then walking up to them and shooting them in the head as they lay there.
Also, cops in the USA seemed trained to start screaming at people (and thus escalating the level of anger/frustration/violence) when they arrive on site. Unlike guys like me that first seek to D
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That may all be true, but it seems to me that the answer should be to increase enforcement of deescalation training and accountability among police forces since we have the authority to do so but for some reason haven't yet, rather than turning to a vigilante force that may or may not have deescalation skills but by definition has no means of enforcing those skills among those who currently lack it.
Re: Vigilante justice (Score:2)
Prowess on the range has zero correlation on results in the field. Zero. There are a number of studies for this. Even the run and gun... They do them to maintain weapon familiarity. On the range, nobody is shooting back at you.
Watch fewer movies.
Re: Vigilante justice (Score:1)
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Re:Vigilante justice (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Vigilante justice (Score:4, Insightful)
Not always. Plenty of times people who are not prepared can make a situation worse.
Re:Vigilante justice (Score:4, Insightful)
Amateur radio operators provide life-saving emergency communications (EMCOMM) during a natural disaster. But the first rule that is emphasized to hams who participate in EMCOMM is this:
"Don't become part of the problem. You are there to assist, not become a victim or act as a first responder."
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Not always. Plenty of times people who are not prepared can make a situation worse.
In this type of situation: probably not. If local authorities are way undermanpowered, and if you have a boat and know how to use it to help someone in dire need, then USE IT. Just do Not go out and self-deploy to a scene. Make sure you have someone else coordinating and supporting your activities who knows where you are and maintains contact where you can get a call for additional resources if needed: make sure
Re:Vigilante justice (Score:4, Interesting)
That is why groups like the: III%, Cajun Navy, American Freedom Keepers, Highwaymen, Riders of the Confederacy -- go out in groups, set up a base of operations with a logistical support network, and generally have some training. Many of them are also ex military, ex police, ex medics, worked in logistics, and many of them are techs as well. They also usually have human intelligence on the ground before they get there, tend to make contact with law enforcement when they arrive so they know who they are so they don't freak out with a mess of guys in gear show up. You don't want people to mistake you for an armed group of looters! They try to connect with businesses and church people ahead of going. They tend to take multiple forms of communications gear, extra fuel, and whatever other resource they can with them that might not be available that they can carry.
That does not mean its always perfectly organized, pretty, free from chaos, nor that it is free from danger. If your area of operations is bacteria infested water, that alone is a danger. It does not mean you cannot end up a part of the problem even after successfully being a part of the solution. Especially if there is no logistical support available to you easily beyond what you can carry. Situations can change rapidly. A levee breaks or a river crests or a road is completely washed out after you get in. Stuff happens. I've seen some of these groups do some pretty amazing things with what they have to work with. Sometimes that is the only support that will exist.
An example of that danger from Hurricane Harvey is where several people took the only good option available when effecting a rescue or bringing in supplies would otherwise have to be brought in by air -- the monster truck or 5 tons with very high intakes and exhausts. These could get into areas that boats could not, and other vehicles definitely could not. They were even in areas that helicopters would be useless in. However, wheels have wheel bearings. They don't perfectly seal. At best they can be packed with grease to keep some of the mud and cruddy water out. After a few days of operating these in that water while sometimes carrying in heavy loads of supplies and ferrying people out, they literally drove them until the wheels came off. The issue of logistical support being unavailable put at least one of them in a bad situation. They did way more good than bad, but not having that support when the rest of society is washing away down the river is never a good thing, especially when the waters are rising all around you and you cannot effect a roadside repair.
All of that being said: A lot of rescue, national guard and support organizations simply bypassed the smaller towns leaving them to fend on their own. The militias and other groups saved a lot of people, coordinated their own usually completely free of your tax dollars support of communities, ran and helped organize the only distribution points available, coordinated with other charities, trucking companies (which is what I did on this end) to get supplies in and help stabilize things. They also did it faster than government response and resources could allow in a great many cases. Many of them are sticking around for as long as they are financially able to to continue providing support during the clean up phase. Or at least sticking around until that mission can be handed off to someone else.
People having downloaded zello provided a way to communicate where people had little else. It also led to a fair amount of duplicate calls for assistance because not everyone is on the same networks. Its still a great resource to have. The more options you give yourself ahead of a crisis the better.
Re:Vigilante justice (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing so helpful as an untrained stranger coming into an unfamiliar situation holding a lethal weapon, pumped up on the excitement of justice and at any second likely to be startled out of their wits.
Think of the big headlines where someone unsure about a situation calls the police and an innocent person gets shot as part of a misunderstanding. Amplify that by a couple orders of magnitude and you have what crowd sourced police 'help' would look like.
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Right, there are situations where you can be helpful and situations where you probably should leave it to the proper authorities.
Grabbing a shovel to help fill sand bags, [great] pitch in.
Rescuing someone being swept out to sea, [maybe] if you know you are a strong swimmer and perhaps have had some water front rescue training in the past. You need to be able to evaluate the risk you will yourself become a victim in need of rescue, if you are unsure you should probably just stay on shore keep your eyes on t
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Can we dare hope that these disasters involving trained officers are a minority?
Though those events are tragic, the one solace is that they are relatively rare. Steps need to be taken to further mitigate the risk of such tragedies, but encouraging totally untrained or ill trained civilians would be exacerbating the problem rather than helping.
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"Any help is better than no help."
You roll up on a nasty crawl, there are people with guns drawn and lots of yelling and screaming, maybe some blood on the ground. What should an over-armed under-trained local vigilante do?
Half or more of the guns might be held by other vigilantes who heard the same call, but without uniforms or badges, who is to know? The perp (if any) might even claim to be one of you. Hysterical and angry people screaming are hardly error-free sources of data.
Now the cops roll up and
Re: Vigilante justice (Score:1)
Bad idea. Let the cops handle things. You won't be able to absorb the legal liability.
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All states have some kind of good Samaritan law.
Re: Vigilante justice (Score:4, Interesting)
Bad idea. Let the cops handle things. You won't be able to absorb the legal liability.
During a large scale disaster, you may as well say "Let the people die". Police and other government agencies are completely overwhelmed in such situations. San Francisco and other cities in earthquake regions realize that and train local citizens in CERT/NERT classes to take part in a neighborhood emergency response team knowing that it can be days before rescuers outside the area can make it in.
Re: Vigilante justice (Score:4, Insightful)
That is very different. Things like police auxiliaries and CERT/NERT where citizens are identified, credentialed and given training to help out with a limited range of common needs is great idea! As far as disaster preparedness and response goes.
Having people download an app to play cop for a day in the way downloading uber lets you play cab driver is a different proposition entirely and sounds a lot more problematic to me.
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It all depends on the situation, I suppose. One of my hobbies is sailing (I have a 27' sloop), and the basic rule on the water is that if someone is in distress, you respond to it if you are able, and it is safe to do so. This is a tradition that is almost as old as history itself. The last one I responded to was a guy in a power vessel with a dead engine, and slowly drifting towards rocks. I passed within a few feet of him, tossed him a line, and took him under tow.
That said, in the modern era, this is usu
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Yes, the best way you can help in an emergency is to apply your field of expertise if it is in any way relevant to the situation. This may mean operating a boat, or it may mean getting a balky Internet connection working.
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The key is willing AND ABLE. You are clearly an experienced sailor, and would not go into a situation where you would yourself likely go from rescuer to victim.
Would you respond to a distress call from someone who was being attacked by a band of armed pirates? If you were captaining a large vessel with a sizeable crew that was also armed, maybe, but I doubt you'd charge in there just you and a buddy on your 27' sloop. It would be a mistake to do so you'd end up just being another victim and needed resc
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Registered handguns? There are an awful lot of guns around Texas and I guarantee that the the only registered ones are Title 3. Heck - there are an awful lot of guns on the room behind me right now and the only registered item is a Spectre 2 suppressor. Texas is a free state and allows its citizen the basic human right of self defense. You loot - they shoot. And it's amazing how little looting there was/is compared to Katrina. I think that having a well armed population cuts down on that crap consider
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Re:Why rescue those who acted stupidly? (Score:5, Insightful)
Being a decent human being is challenging. So just keep practicing, you will get there.
Re:Why rescue those who acted stupidly? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say the GP AC has demonstrated a complete lack of regard for human life by dismissing everyone who didn't evacuate as "stupid" without any attempt to understand whether they actually had the ability to evacuate.
The viral photo of the seniors at a flooded assisted living center are a good example of what's wrong with that logic. None of those people had the ability to evacuate themselves, but you and the GP are both dismissing them as "stupid" and not worthy of being rescued without any regard for the situation they found themselves in.
There is nothing decent or humane about your comments here. You should both be ashamed of yourselves.
Re: Why rescue those who acted stupidly? (Score:4, Insightful)
The self reliance was always a myth. Unless you moved straight into the heart of completely untamed "Indian Country" and built a cabin and livelihood with your own two hands. In which case you were probably killed or chased of very quickly by the natives as an illegal invader, as word had already spread from the East Coast as to exactly what sort of demons the Europeans always proved themselves to be.
In reality that much-loved independence was always backed by a network of friends, family, neighbors, etc. that pulled together as a community to help out those who fell on hard times. Or you just died when bad luck hit. That happened too. But as populations grew, those personal bonds broke down - there's no such think as a tight-knit community of millions. Or even tens of thousands. And so the support that community provided must now be provided by larger, more faceless mechanisms (which certainly have their own problems).
As for intelligence - America has had a strong anti-intellectual bent from its inception "nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." " -- Isaac Asimov
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As for intelligence - America has had a strong anti-intellectual bent from its inception "nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." " -- Isaac Asimov
Some parts of America have long had the anti-intellectual bent, which they acquired largely in reaction to the pro-intellectual and zealous progressive proselytization of the Yankee northeast. From the 17th century the Yankee northeast revered education above wealth and birth and deeply trusted in collective, democratic community decisionmaking over aristocratic and other tradition, and worked to spread their gospel (originally religious gospel; later a sort of secular humanist gospel).
Meanwhile, the Virg
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"evacuate themselves" - Fun trivia note, when a person evacuates themselves, it means they soiled themselves, not that they transported to a different location. I am pretty sure all of these people had the ability to evacuate themselves, but they probably didn't have the ability to travel.
I'm pretty sure some of the people who didn't evacuate themselves to another location ended up evacuating themselves your way.
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I'd say the GP AC is a "decent human being", to use your words, because of this part of the comment: "Why risk lives saving the stupid?". So clearly the GP AC is compassionate and cares about people, but just people who aren't stupid. If anyone is lacking compassion, I have to agree that it would be the people who chose to stay behind despite ample warning, and who then demand to be rescued, needlessly endangering the lives of the rescuers. Putting other people in danger out of your own negligent behavior is not "being a decent human being".
Not everyone that rides out a hurricane is "stupid", some don't have the means to leave the area.
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Not everyone that rides out a hurricane is "stupid", some don't have the means to leave the area.
Then I would slowly start to question 'what is wrong' with "your system".
If there is a call for evacuation in Germany, happens rarely, but happens: the government provides the means of evacuation. AND: takes care that EVERYONE is evacuated. The only way to not get evacuated is to actively play hide and seek. And if you get caught doing that the punishment is heavy fines and/or jail time.
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Not everyone that rides out a hurricane is "stupid", some don't have the means to leave the area.
Then I would slowly start to question 'what is wrong' with "your system".
Politics.
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Then I would slowly start to question 'what is wrong' with "your system".
Politics.
"Freedom" is why the government cannot order people to leave their homes. This is not a wrong in the system. "Politics" comes in when people exercise their freedom not to evacuate and then expect the government to make good their losses. That's the wrong part.
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If anyone is lacking compassion, I have to agree that it would be the people who chose to stay behind despite ample warning, and who then demand to be rescued, needlessly endangering the lives of the rescuers. Putting other people in danger out of your own negligent behavior is not "being a decent human being".
Not everyone that rides out a hurricane is "stupid", some don't have the means to leave the area.
I emphasized the conditional part of the statement, which makes your response a nonsequitor. Everyone WHO CHOOSES TO STAY is stupid.
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It's easy to say that when you're wealthy enough that you can afford to fill your car with gas (and you have a car) to take your valuables and get out of town, but when you're faced with leaving everything you value in life back in your home so you can wait for a bus that never comes to take you to a shelter of unknown safety/supplies to be packed in a room with 1000 other people who, like you , are also too poor to evacuate.... you might reconsider.
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And exactly what "arrangements" is someone supposed to make when they have no money or family elsewhere to take them in?
Yep, just take that $5 you managed to save up last year and buy a $1000 train ticket to some random place where you'll have no connections, food, or source of income to get back on your feet.
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If they don't have the means to leave, they shouldn't be there at all, which is where the stupid comes in.
Then where should poor people live? Or does society just incinerate them since poor people have no place in our society?
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I hope you're not suggesting that the hurricane zones are places for the poor. They are some of the most expensive places in the US to live, what with being coastal.
If you want a place for the poor, move to Nebraska or South Dakota or some shit. No hurricanes there. Not much of anything there, but it's cheap.
Did I say something that suggests I wanted to uproot poor people from wherever they live now and force them into containment camps out of the way of hurricans?
Besides, why do you want to move them from hurricane country to tornado country? There are few places in the USA that are not subject to some natural disaster whether hurricanes, flooding, fires, tornados, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.
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Note that we are not talking about people jumping out in the middle of a hurricane to help people. We are talking about folks puttering about in boats in flooded areas fetching people stranded in their homes. It's certainly more challenging boating than most of them are used to, but not crazy so much so that they are putting their lives in grave danger for the sake of attempting rescues.
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well, let's see if you say that same thing when it is a relative of yours.
here's the deal, you do not know everything about everybody. One paraplegic in Marathon, he tried to schedule a service to take him to the airport to evacuate Tuesday last week. His service said sure. His flight got cancelled Saturday, and he couldn't get a cab or taxi and there was no other option for him but to stay with a friend on the third floor apartment that friend had. So they are trapped in a building that is flooded.
But his
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There are always people that fall through the cracks but the majority of people had options to get out but were more worried about their possessions and looters than their lives, this was announced at least a week in advance and nobody started moving until 0-48 hours before when the situation was already dire.
And living up hurricane alley, does the majority of people have proper preparations, sufficient food? Again, no. How hard is it to store a couple of crates of water and canned food? I live nowhere near
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There's a middle ground here. People who genuinely could not evacuate themselves for whatever reason is a different story.
The GP's point about people who were capable of evacuating but stayed and ended up needing to be rescued and causing easily avoidable risks to the emergency responders is valid. Those people are extremely selfish and stupid.
If everyone who could evacuate did, it would have freed up a significant pool of resources that could have instead provided faster, additional aid to the people wh
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Here was my experience with Andrew, 1992. We were teaching a Scuba Diving course in West Palm Beach while it was still in the Atlantic and unsure of the landfall. We can into the hotel that night with the announcement that it will hit Miami within the next 48 hours. I packed up my car in WPB, went back to Miami, grabbed as much as I could (computer, VCR, TV, clothes, and of course my cat) and left. This was all before the storm gained intensity and hit Cat 5, I would called my work 4 hours later when I
Re:Why rescue those who acted stupidly? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can help you, since I saw Hurricane Harvey first-hand. Most people who were saved by these "cajun navy" volunteers did not know that their neighborhoods would become disaster areas. There was no precedent for 53" of rain, or the dams in the reservoirs to have to be opened unleashing millions of gallons of water into neighborhoods that had never flooded before.
Second, evacuation was simply not an option. Houston has a metro-area population of 6.5 million people. The last time they tried to evacuate ahead of a storm, many more people died trying to evacuate than died in Hurricane Harvey. Most people really can't conceive of the sheer size of Houston. It's vast, and the area affected by catastrophic flooding was huge. We moved out of Houston after the flood on the first day there were roads open leaving town (Aug 31) and there were still so many people trying to evacuate ahead of the still-rising flood waters that it took a full day of driving to get from Midtown, where we lived, to the city limits. We only got as far as College Station by late that night.
Houston is a city that has grown without planning, without human reason. The "freedom" that Texans value so highly and brag about so much for certain members of Texas society is a guarantee that when something really bad happens, a lot more people will suffer than if they'd had, you know, zoning laws.
Remember, Texas is a state where the most celebrated, the most revered, and the most re-enacted military battle is one in which every single Texan was slaughtered. Disaster is in their blood (along with toxic substances from the many chemical plants, refineries and fracking rigs).
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Even if Houston had sane zoning laws, there literally is no precedent for 53 inches of rain in 2 days, which is the average amount of rain that Houston gets in 365 days. The local and extended area response was still a hell of a lot better than what happened in New Orleans after Katrina (where there were mass rapes, lots of people firing on rescue boats and helicopters, and it took a large military presence to get things back u
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New Orleans is an ancient, densely populated city that's situated directly on the Gulf Coast. Houston is a sprawling, new city, 50 miles inland. I saw somewhere that the majority of houses that were flooded in Houston were built since 1990.
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You love fake news so much?
http://www.slate.com/articles/... [slate.com]
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That's completely moronic. We aren't talking about an area that has endemic flooding every 10 years. We're talking about a biblical flood. If that same flood had hit any other coastal region in the United States, the damage would have been just as bad or worse, zoning be damed.
>Further, if you really
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I think, assuming he was a real person, his bones are rotting in the ground somewhere.
>Ah yes, the call of idiots everywhere. Look, it's very simple. You don't fucking build on a flood plain. And guess what? That's what much of Texas is, so you shouldn't build there.
Much of Texas is on a flood plain, eh? If so, then by that rational then so is the midwest, the south, and the Atlantic states all the way up to Rho
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Much of Texas is on a flood plain, eh? If so, then by that rational then so is the midwest, the south, and the Atlantic states all the way up to Rhode Island.
Correct! I believe you have finally got it!
Furthermore, California is an earthquake zone,
The entire country is an earthquake zone. There's nowhere there's no faults, only places where they are fewer and where they are expected to be active less often. The whole country should take seismic activity into account in building codes.
Wyoming is a massive caldera zone,
Lots of California is, as well.
I don't actually propose that nobody should ever spend time in these places, but that building codes should take reality into account. And if that means that people are only permitted to live in so
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See, I think it's wrong not to help people who have been wiped out by a disaster. But the corollary to that (in my mind) is that I think it's stupid to settle people where they are likely to be wiped out if there is a disaster. That only makes it more disastrous.
But the implicit assumption you're making in this case is that all these flooded houses in Houston were likely to experience a flood like this. Likely over what sort of time scale? As others have noted multiple times, there is no historical precedent at all for what happened. It makes perfect sense to criticize re-building in a place that has repeatedly flooded. But we're talking about places that have never, ever flooded in recorded history. Any estimate of the likelihood of something like this happen
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But the implicit assumption you're making in this case is that all these flooded houses in Houston were likely to experience a flood like this. Likely over what sort of time scale?
Well, that leads nicely into the other point of denial, which is that Texas helped bring this on itself by pumping oil out of the ground to be burned. This sort of thing is the new "normal", and you'd better fucking get used to it.
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Sure, Amelia (which was a TS and not a hurricane) hit Houston in 1978. It killed 33 people. The Houston MSA had a population of 2.8 million in 1978 vs 6.7 million today. Harvey killed 70 people. So, death toll scaled a little less than linearly with population expansion.
>And Flooding [wikipedia.org] in general is not unprecedented, so...maybe you should think about what you claim is unprecedented.
Flooding of that scale is quite r
Re:Why rescue those who acted stupidly? (Score:5, Insightful)
Houston is a city that has grown without planning, without human reason.
To be fair to Houston, and while I'm sure it is pretty bad, I don't think you'll find any large or even small city in the world which took "get entire population to go somewhere else on the same day" into account when they designed the transport system.
Most cities can't handle workers going home in the afternoon. "Well planned" cities only just scrape past this barrier.
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There was no precedent for 53" of rain, or the dams in the reservoirs to have to be opened unleashing millions of gallons of water into neighborhoods that had never flooded before.
I understand from a coworker who has family in Houston (and actually in South Florida as well) that FEMA is telling people that got flooded when they opened the dams that they aren't covered with disaster relief funds since the storm itself didn't cause the damage.
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yet you waited until the predictable flooding happened before leaving?!
So quick to criticize, so slow to comprehend.
The degree of flooding surprised a lot of people, as the OP mentioned:
There was no precedent for 53" of rain, or the dams in the reservoirs to have to be opened unleashing millions of gallons of water into neighborhoods that had never flooded before.
It was a clusterfuck because Harvey dropped a lot of rain---more than hurricanes that were "bigger" based on size or wind speed.
Harvey had a coastal surge like every other hurricane, but it didn't really affect Houston. The intense rain and reservoir relief were not predicted, and they are what flooded the city.
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If you read the article closely, you'll see that the "de facto zoning" laws that the article talks about only apply to the downtown business district, which saw little flooding and damage.
Questioning charity (Score:3)
That's a good question. Fortunately, because the rescuers are volunteers, we do not have to answer it. If they feel like helping people, it is up to them — even if it can be argued, that they are rescuing fools, who'd be better off dead.
And then we can revisit the mandatory charity of providing health care to the fools, who haven't bothered procuring health insurance in advance, school-lunches for kids, whose parents can't afford them, etc. Whoever f
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Hey, if we can stop funding the military-industrial complex first, I'm all for it. Compared to that, all the various aid programs combined amount to a drop in the bucket of what's confiscated in taxes - and it's spent far less effectively.
Of course you must understand that when some disaster strikes your area, and the insurance companies all go "well shit, we can't actually pay for all this", then you're up shit creak and nobody else will help you, either.
Re:Questioning charity (Score:4, Insightful)
What's the connection?
Are you delusional or are you lying? Here is the 2016's budget, for example [insidegov.com]:
To be more wrong than you are, one would've have to claim, the Moon is made of cheese...
Moreover, unlike any charity, maintaining capable military is, actually, a government's responsibility explicitly written in the Constitution while everything else is wrong:
TFA is exactly about people helping others — saving their lives. So, you are wrong once again... How do you function day to day — or do you have a minder or something?
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Calling social security or unemployment part of the federal budget is disingenuous, as is calling them social programs. They are risk pools (insurance programs), and they have entirely separate funding sources, paid for by the workers and employers that take advantage of them. People pay into those pools when they work, and they expect to get money back out of them at appropriate times (upon retirement, upon disability, upon losing a
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Yeah, it's a mess, because of a number of factors. Basically, both parties thoroughly screwed retirees:
The Democrats:
The Republicans:
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Do I detect a note of sarcasm in your statements, or are you really that partisan? This is not a (D) or (R) issue. The sooner you realize that the better off you will be.
Your statements above should at least give you a clue as to why the Democrat Party has shown decline in the past 10 years, just as there is growing discontent for the Republicans in their own party that is currently happening. It has now passed partisan politics and most people just want a government that will work for ALL the people, not
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No, it is not — because people do not pay into those "pools" voluntarily. Whatever you call them, they are taxes. Also, the actual Unemployment Insurance schemes are operated by the States — what propping they get from Federal budget is just that, a mandatory charity.
But, hey, let's take the Social Security and Unemployment out of it. That still leaves "Medicare and general health spending", at 28% or nearly twice
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And then we can revisit the mandatory charity of providing health care to the fools, who haven't bothered procuring health insurance in advance, school-lunches for kids, whose parents can't afford them, etc. Whoever feels those people should be helped, is welcome to do that on their own â" without the government confiscating money at the point of weapon from others.
We've been doing this gunpoint-money-charity thing for a while, it's worked out pretty well so far. Your distress about this issue is presumably the result of the conflict between your frothing lunacy and how the world really works.
Re:Why rescue those who acted stupidly? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well for one, those in Houston were explicitly told 'don't evacuate', basically telling people by trying, they put themselves at risk of being stuck in their car on the road which is more dangerous than their house. In fact that is precisely what did happen in Texas before, more people died trying to evacuate than probably would have died by sitting in place.
Now one could easily say the answer would have been to do proper evacuation planning rather than giving up on evacuation altogether, but that's the government's failing and there's a lot of folks who were doing precisely what they were being told and for somewhat valid reasons.
Rescues *during* the storm are one thing in terms of risk, but by and large we are talking about post-storm rescues in the wake of the flooding. These activities were certainly challenging, contending with hazards and strong currents, but not particularly life threatening given the proper precautions all boaters should know.
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Now one could easily say the answer would have been to do proper evacuation planning rather than giving up on evacuation altogether, but that's the government's failing
No, it's a group effort. All the people who have moved to Houston for work even though it's just one big flood plain share the blame. The only people who don't are the people who were born poor there. They actually have an excuse for why they haven't left, and nobody should be giving them a hard time for not leaving. None of those people with money want to move into their shit-shack anyway.
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There are a lot of flood plains, earthquake zones, hurricane and tornado alleys, and fire-prone areas in this country. The idea that people could simply move out of all of those areas is not realistic.
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There are a lot of flood plains, earthquake zones, hurricane and tornado alleys, and fire-prone areas in this country. The idea that people could simply move out of all of those areas is not realistic.
First, stop saying earthquake zones, for two reasons — both of which make you look dumb. Reason the first, nobody has to move out of those places when you can solve the problem with building codes. Reason the second, the whole planet is an earthquake zone. There are only places that have earthquakes regularly, and places that will have them eventually.
Second, the idea that you shouldn't move out of places that are going to get obliterated by severe weather because it's expensive is a dumb one. It's mo
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Zello is already not working in many areas. Do you realize the amount of infrastructure required to transmit something as simple as a VOIP message over a cellular network?
Do you realize that a simple handheld transceiver (with or without a repeater) can transmit analog voice traffic even when the cellular networks are completely down or overloaded and the internet infrastructure in an area has been destroyed?
The internet is what will struggle to stay relevant when the shit hits the fan. Sure, it makes an an
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Is there something that makes analog signals more disaster resistant than digital?
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