OK, folks... gonna share some things and leave them up here.
I’ve seen a lot of stuff on social media about volunteers showing in areas that have been devasted by the hurricane being turned around, donated supplies being rejected, government officials not using help that’s show up, and so on. Allow me to offer a few thoughts… Take them, and $10, and you can get a up of coffee at Starbucks…
First, it's been pointed out that there are people and nations out there that have heavily infiltrated our social media and like nothing better than to sow discord with misinformation. That’s certainly a point to keep in mind.
Second, lots of those stories are “friend of a friend” games of telephone over social media. Many are incomplete or misleading due to sensationalizing on the “they stopped a team of medics!” or “turned away supplies” without the second part of “and redirected them to…” of “because the person they were going to help was already helped” part of the story.
Third, and maybe this should have been first, is that the level of chaos in an emergency on that level over that large an area is almost impossible to comprehend. There are places that have had every road into an area, and all the power, telephone, and cable lines, destroyed. The emergency radio system got overwhelmed and had to direct anyone not actually on the clock and working to turn their radios off because they were tying up needed bandwidth/computer/radio resources. (Modern trunked radio systems are complicated and I’ve probably oversimplified the explanation.) They are dealing with multi-state, multi-county issues and chaos. There’s just plain going to be lots of cases where the left hand doesn’t know what’s going on with the right… and to stretch the analogy, one person’s left hand doesn’t have the first clue what someone else’s right hand is doing.
Continuing because I’m tired of counting reasons… Resources have to get to where they’re useful, not where they happen to show up. 100K liters of drinking water might be great… but not if it’s somewhere that the water is fine – but they really need food. A trained EMT and an ambulance might be a great thing to have when folks are hurt, but not if they don’t have a hospital to go to.
One of the first rules of any sort of rescue operation is “don’t become part of the problem.” That means don’t become another person that needs rescued – and it also means don’t make somewhere with already stretched resources have to deal with another mouth and another person without real jobs for them. My (slightly) educated guess is that, right now, what they really need are bulldozers and road construction teams and linemen to replace power lines and communication lines. Search and rescue teams may be great – but not if they don’t have a way to get them where they need to go.
That’s one of the biggest things that FEMA brings to a situation – organization and structure and resource management. There’s an entire system, the National Incident Management System or NIMS, that is explicitly for handling this sort of thing. You can take classes on it free through FEMA at Emergency Management Institute - National Incident Management System (NIMS). That’ll give you a clue about how much is involved in organizing something like this. I’ll almost bet you that there is an area of management or organization mentioned that you haven’t thought of…
Have mistakes been made? Absolutely. Have people done dumb things? You bet. Are there jerks who are spinning out of control and making dumb decisions? Yep. But it’s also worth considering that there just might be more to the story, too…
I’ve seen a lot of stuff on social media about volunteers showing in areas that have been devasted by the hurricane being turned around, donated supplies being rejected, government officials not using help that’s show up, and so on. Allow me to offer a few thoughts… Take them, and $10, and you can get a up of coffee at Starbucks…
First, it's been pointed out that there are people and nations out there that have heavily infiltrated our social media and like nothing better than to sow discord with misinformation. That’s certainly a point to keep in mind.
Second, lots of those stories are “friend of a friend” games of telephone over social media. Many are incomplete or misleading due to sensationalizing on the “they stopped a team of medics!” or “turned away supplies” without the second part of “and redirected them to…” of “because the person they were going to help was already helped” part of the story.
Third, and maybe this should have been first, is that the level of chaos in an emergency on that level over that large an area is almost impossible to comprehend. There are places that have had every road into an area, and all the power, telephone, and cable lines, destroyed. The emergency radio system got overwhelmed and had to direct anyone not actually on the clock and working to turn their radios off because they were tying up needed bandwidth/computer/radio resources. (Modern trunked radio systems are complicated and I’ve probably oversimplified the explanation.) They are dealing with multi-state, multi-county issues and chaos. There’s just plain going to be lots of cases where the left hand doesn’t know what’s going on with the right… and to stretch the analogy, one person’s left hand doesn’t have the first clue what someone else’s right hand is doing.
Continuing because I’m tired of counting reasons… Resources have to get to where they’re useful, not where they happen to show up. 100K liters of drinking water might be great… but not if it’s somewhere that the water is fine – but they really need food. A trained EMT and an ambulance might be a great thing to have when folks are hurt, but not if they don’t have a hospital to go to.
One of the first rules of any sort of rescue operation is “don’t become part of the problem.” That means don’t become another person that needs rescued – and it also means don’t make somewhere with already stretched resources have to deal with another mouth and another person without real jobs for them. My (slightly) educated guess is that, right now, what they really need are bulldozers and road construction teams and linemen to replace power lines and communication lines. Search and rescue teams may be great – but not if they don’t have a way to get them where they need to go.
That’s one of the biggest things that FEMA brings to a situation – organization and structure and resource management. There’s an entire system, the National Incident Management System or NIMS, that is explicitly for handling this sort of thing. You can take classes on it free through FEMA at Emergency Management Institute - National Incident Management System (NIMS). That’ll give you a clue about how much is involved in organizing something like this. I’ll almost bet you that there is an area of management or organization mentioned that you haven’t thought of…
Have mistakes been made? Absolutely. Have people done dumb things? You bet. Are there jerks who are spinning out of control and making dumb decisions? Yep. But it’s also worth considering that there just might be more to the story, too…
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