Hurricane Isabel and Virginia

Meryl continues to report on inadequate disaster assistance in Virginia. Her posts ask the question �Why wasn�t the government better prepared?�

This is a question that Americans ask after every disaster. One that there is no clear answer to. And, sadly, one that puts all the pressure on government at every level for preparedness. Any failure of the private sector is deemed to be a failure of the government, for no other reason than not exercising oversight of the private sector.

Meryl says that all the hospitals in Richmond closed. That, to me as a responder and an EMT, is beyond astonishing. Every hospital in my community has a disaster plan. Every hospital has generators. In the blackout earlier this year, Park Ridge hospital�s generator failed. The county was immediately able to move a generator from the water treatment plant in, and a combination of county, fire and electric company employees repaired the existing generator. It is nearly inconceivable that a hospital would not be prepared for a disaster. Nor, that the local municipality, or the county, or the state, would not have plans for a disaster that covered this. Or, that demanded that the hospitals produce plans that cover this.

If hospitals are closed due to the disaster, it is directly the fault of the hospitals, the local and state governments. The same holds true for police stations, fire stations, or ambulance stations that are without power. My tiny ambulance corps has had a generator for five years or so. It took our tiny town about six or seven years put one in, after the ice storm of 1991, but it spent the money. And the generator worked for both the ice storm of 2003, and the blackout of 2003.

Meryl is correct that providing ice won�t do much for frozen food when the power is off for a week. It�s a sop, because people demand it. So is bottled water. Guess what? The agency providing water to your community should be held responsible for not having a generator to power water treatment. Ours do. And have for nearly a decade or more.

If Virginia has lower local and state taxes than New York, one of the things that Virginians have given up in the bargain is governmental oversight (nanny government) and the ability to pay for projects and solutions that may only be used once a decade or so. Any bitching about disaster preparedness should start with the municipal government and local not-for-profits and proceed upward to the state government. Hospitals, for example, receive a huge benefit from being tax exempt. It is not unreasonable to expect them to plan for the future, both economically as well as for disasters.

Electric companies that do not plan for disaster should be faulted. So should the state agencies that oversee those utilities. If you want to point fingers, start at the bottom and work your way up.

The people of Richmond pay taxes or fees for their water. Sewer tax, water fees, something. Typically these accounts run huge surpluses, which are then used to undertake large capital projects so that less money has to be borrowed by the water district. If Richmond does not have drinking water, perhaps it's time to ask the water district what happened to all that money? And, how have they used the millions of dollars that the Federal Government has made available, or did they even apply?

What role should FEMA have in all this? FEMA has stockpiles of stuff, but stuff ages, must be inventoried, replaced, maintained, etc. Many of the same people asking the FEMA do more would be screaming as FEMA dumped tons and tons of expired food and water if it stockpiled for worst-case scenarios. And they�d be screaming at the numbers of people employed to sit around warehouses, conduct inventories, or maintain unused generators. Hell, these are the same people who bitch to the city government when they see paid firefighters sitting outside their station on a sunny day. People forget that paying people �just in case� is expensive, and results in those same people doing a lot of sitting around on the clock. FEMA has access to enormous personnel resources, but they come on line as needed. In EMS alone, vast amounts of material and personnel can be deployed in a disaster, if needed. They have deployed several DMAT teams in the region, along with 54 big generators to Virginia alone.

But all the hospitals, all the police and fire stations are still standing. This is not a situation where the local resources have been wiped out. This is a situation where the local resources need to get their acts together. FEMA doesn�t deploy electric linemen, not tree removal experts. It doesn�t provide trash collectors. The localities are responsible for continuing to provide the services that they normally provide with the support and assistance of FEMA. FEMA can make suggestions, but we have also seen in the past, in other areas, that the local administrators will not take FEMA�s advice, nor request the appropriate assistance from FEMA. And, by law, FEMA cannot do anything about that.

So, just what should FEMA be doing? Ideally, making up for what the localities can't do because of the disaster. It can urge, pursuade, challenge localities to prepare, but it has no authority to make them. The Federal Government has spent billions on becomeing prepared since September 11, 2001, with billions alone being allocated to the states and localities. I challenged that when the smallpox vaccines were an issue. All of the money allocated to the states and localities that was spent on this issue went to vaccinate a very few hospital administrators and workers, and to buy new labs, new computers, hire new bodies, etc. No money was left to innoculate EMT's, police or firefighters. The money went to empire building
. It is up to the voters of Virginia to hold their elcted and appointed officials accountable for disaster planning, and for the proper use of the resources that are provided to them by the Federal Government.

-- posted by Chuck at Wednesday, September 24, 2003 | E-mail | Permalink | Main | 0 comments

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Wednesday, September 24, 2003

Hurricane Isabel and Virginia